Literary Criticism : American

More than just a gimmick, the collaborative novels of writers such as Mark Twain, Henry James and William Dean Howells, during the period 1870-1920, were a serious attempt to work through the anxieties authors faced in an ever more competitive and businesslike market. more...

Price: $79.95

A Companion to American Fiction 1780-1865 presents current critical responses to the broad range of American fiction written from the earliest declarations of nationhood to secession and civil war. The volume features contributions from over 35 leading international critics and scholars, who offer a cultural and historical context that serves to illuminate the fiction. The Companion covers both less well-known writers, such as Lydia Maria Child and George Lippard, and canonical authors, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Contributors demonstrate how these authors present conflicts about territory and sovereignty and questions of gender, race, ethnicity, and identity. more...

Price: $121.95

This cutting-edge Companion is a comprehensive resource for the study of the modern American novel. Published at a time when literary modernism is being thoroughly reassessed, it reflects current investigations into the origins and character of the movement as a whole.: Brings together 28 original essays from leading scholars; Allows readers to orient individual works and authors in their principal cultural and social contexts; Contributes to efforts to recover minority voices, such as those of African American novelists, and popular subgenres, such as detective fiction; Directs students to major relevant scholarship for further inquiry; Suggests the many ways that “modern”, “American” and “fiction” carry new meanings in the twenty-first century more...

Price: $199.95

This Concise Companion offers an authoritative overview of American fiction from 1900-1950 focusing on the literature that developed out of the social, cultural, and political changes, which occurred in the first part of the 20th century. With careful reference to key authors and their works, newly-commissioned chapters examine the period's formative events, such as the Depression and the two World Wars, and their representation in literature. In addition, essays also analyze the multiple and paraadoxical self-descriptions that have been taken to define modernism, such as the 'rise of proletarian literature' and the 'high modernist' novel. Looking at issues of race, language, cosmopolitanism, and the First and Second World Wars, this volume introduces the contextual information and strategic knowledge that students need to formulate their own readings of classic American fiction. Authors such as Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, who have defined our understanding of modernism for so long, are reread in relation to key texts of the period by Richard Wright, Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, and Anzia Yezierska. This Companion examines the original context of these authors' works and looks at its current reception to uncover how 20th-century literature is being reinterpreted in the new millennium. more...

Price: $100.00

A breathtaking achievement, this Concise Companion is a suitable crown to the astonishing production in African American literature and criticism that has swept over American literary studies in the last two decades. It offers an enormous range of writers-from Sojourner Truth to Frederick Douglass, from Zora Neale Hurston to Ralph Ellison, and from Toni Morrison to August Wilson. It contains entries on major works (including synopses of novels), such as Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Richard Wright's Native Son, and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. It also incorporates information on literary characters such as Bigger Thomas, Coffin Ed Johnson, Kunta Kinte, Sula Peace, as well as on character types such as Aunt Jemima, Brer Rabbit, John Henry, Stackolee, and the trickster. Icons of black culture are addressed, including vivid details about the lives of Muhammad Ali, John Coltrane, Marcus Garvey, Jackie Robinson, John Brown, and Harriet Tubman. Here, too, are general articles on poetry, fiction, and drama; on autobiography, slave narratives, Sunday School literature, and oratory; as well as on a wide spectrum of related topics. Compact yet thorough, this handy volume gathers works from a vast array of sources--from the black periodical press to women's clubs--making it one of the most substantial guides available on the growing, exciting world of African American literature. more...

Price: $30.00