Download or read book A Companion to American Fiction 1865 1914 written by Robert Paul Lamb and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to American Fiction, 1865-1914 is a groundbreaking collection of essays written by leading critics for a wide audience of scholars, students, and interested general readers. An exceptionally broad-ranging and accessible Companion to the study of American fiction of the post-civil war period and the early twentieth century Brings together 29 essays by top scholars, each of which presents a synthesis of the best research and offers an original perspective Divided into sections on historical traditions and genres, contexts and themes, and major authors Covers a mixture of canonical and the non-canonical themes, authors, literatures, and critical approaches Explores innovative topics, such as ecological literature and ecocriticism, children’s literature, and the influence of Darwin on fiction

Download or read book Booth written by Karen Joy Fowler and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-02-07 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best Book of the Year Real Simple • AARP • USA Today • NPR • Virginia Living Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize From the Man Booker finalist and bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves comes an epic and intimate novel about the family behind one of the most infamous figures in American history: John Wilkes Booth. In 1822, a secret family moves into a secret cabin some thirty miles northeast of Baltimore, to farm, to hide, and to bear ten children over the course of the next sixteen years. Junius Booth—breadwinner, celebrated Shakespearean actor, and master of the house in more ways than one—is at once a mesmerizing talent and a man of terrifying instability. One by one the children arrive, as year by year, the country draws frighteningly closer to the boiling point of secession and civil war. As the tenor of the world shifts, the Booths emerge from their hidden lives to cement their place as one of the country’s leading theatrical families. But behind the curtains of the many stages they have graced, multiple scandals, family triumphs, and criminal disasters begin to take their toll, and the solemn siblings of John Wilkes Booth are left to reckon with the truth behind the destructively specious promise of an early prophecy. Booth is a startling portrait of a country in the throes of change and a vivid exploration of the ties that make, and break, a family.

Download or read book Stoner written by John Williams and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2015 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Born the child of a poor farmer in Missouri, William Stoner is urged by his parents to study new agriculture techniques at the state university. Digging instead into the texts of Milton and Shakespeare, Stoner falls under the spell of the unexpected pleasures of English literature, and decides to make it his life. Stoner is the story of that life"--

Download or read book Postmodern American Fiction written by Paula Geyh and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 1998 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collects works by sixty-eight authors, including William S. Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, Art Spiegelman, Lynda Barry, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Douglas Coupland

Download or read book American Dirt Oprah s Book Club written by Jeanine Cummins and published by Holt Paperbacks. This book was released on 2022-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "También de este lado hay sueños. On this side, too, there are dreams. Lydia Quixano Perez lives in the Mexican city of Acapulco. She runs a bookstore. She has a son, Luca, the love of her life, and a wonderful husband who is a journalist. And while there are cracks beginning to show in Acapulco because of the drug cartels, her life is, by and large, fairly comfortable. Even though she knows they'll never sell, Lydia stocks some of her all-time favorite books in her store. And then one day a man enters the shop to browse and comes up to the register with four books he would like to buy--two of them her favorites. Javier is erudite. He is charming. And, unbeknownst to Lydia, he is the jefe of the newest drug cartel that has gruesomely taken over the city. When Lydia's husband's tell-all profile of Javier is published, none of their lives will ever be the same. Forced to flee, Lydia and eight-year-old Luca soon find themselves miles and worlds away from their comfortable middle-class existence. Instantly transformed into migrants, Lydia and Luca ride la bestia--trains that make their way north toward the United States, which is the only place Javier's reach doesn't extend. As they join the countless people trying to reach el norte, Lydia soon sees that everyone is running from something. But what exactly are they running to? American Dirt will leave readers utterly changed when they finish reading it. A page-turner filled with poignancy, drama, and humanity on every page, it is a literary achievement."--

Download or read book Major Characters in American Fiction written by Jack Salzman and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2014-09-23 with total page 1591 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Major Characters in American Fiction is the perfect companion for everyone who loves literature--students, book-group members, and serious readers at every level. Developed at Columbia University's Center for American Culture Studies, Major Characters in American Fiction offers in-depth essays on the "lives" of more than 1,500 characters, figures as varied in ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, age, and experience as we are. Inhabiting fictional works written from 1790 to 1991, the characters are presented in biographical essays that tell each one's life story. They are drawn from novels and short stories that represent ever era, genre, and style of American fiction writing--Natty Bumppo of The Leatherstocking Tales, Celie of The Color Purple, and everyone in between.

Download or read book A Confederacy of Dunces written by John Kennedy Toole and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize “A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.”—The New York Times Book Review A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero, one Ignatius J. Reilly, is "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures" (Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times).

Download or read book Native American Fiction written by David Treuer and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2013-05-21 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An entirely new approach to reading, understanding, and enjoying Native American fiction This book has been written with the narrow conviction that if Native American literature is worth thinking about at all, it is worth thinking about as literature. The vast majority of thought that has been poured out onto Native American literature has puddled, for the most part, on how the texts are positioned in relation to history or culture. Rather than create a comprehensive cultural and historical genealogy for Native American literature, David Treuer investigates a selection of the most important Native American novels and, with a novelist's eye and a critic's mind, examines the intricate process of understanding literature on its own terms. Native American Fiction: A User's Manual is speculative, witty, engaging, and written for the inquisitive reader. These essays—on Sherman Alexie, Forrest Carter, James Fenimore Cooper, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and James Welch—are rallying cries for the need to read literature as literature and, ultimately, reassert the importance and primacy of the word.

Download or read book If God Meant to Interfere written by Christopher Douglas and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-12 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of the Christian Right took many writers and literary critics by surprise, trained as we were to think that religions waned as societies became modern. In If God Meant to Interfere, Christopher Douglas shows that American writers struggled to understand and respond to this new social and political force. Religiously inflected literature since the 1970s must be understood in the context of this unforeseen resurgence of conservative Christianity, he argues, a resurgence that realigned the literary and cultural fields. Among the writers Douglas considers are Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, N. Scott Momaday, Gloria Anzaldúa, Philip Roth, Carl Sagan, and Dan Brown. Their fictions engaged a wide range of topics: religious conspiracies, faith and wonder, slavery and imperialism, evolution and extraterrestrial contact, alternate histories and ancestral spiritualities. But this is only part of the story. Liberal-leaning literary writers responding to the resurgence were sometimes confused by the Christian Right’s strange entanglement with the contemporary paradigms of multiculturalism and postmodernism —leading to complex emergent phenomena that Douglas terms "Christian multiculturalism" and "Christian postmodernism." Ultimately, If God Meant to Interfere shows the value of listening to our literature for its sometimes subterranean attention to the religious and social upheavals going on around it.

Download or read book American Fiction in the Cold War written by Thomas H. Schaub and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Schaub presents American fiction in the political climate of its time. Through the 1930s, he portrays authors as typically left of center and becoming disillusioned with communism as a result of Stalin's purges and his nonaggression pact with Hitler. Subsequent authors embraced a His general discussion comes to focus on the works of Barth, O'Connor, Ellison, and Mailer. Paper edition (unseen), $12.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book Sensational Designs written by Jane Tompkins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1986-05-29 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this provocative book, Jane Tompkins seeks to move the study of literature away from the small group of critically approved texts that have dominated literary discussion over the decades, to allow inclusion of texts ignored or denigrated by the literary academy. Sensational Designs challenges comfortable assumptions about what makes a literary work a "classic."

Download or read book American Mischief written by Alan Lelchuk and published by Terrace Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By turns hilarious and alarming, American Mischief is an ambitious attempt to define the disorders of American culture. Originally published in 1970, the novel takes on sexual anarchy, political madness, the collapse of monogamy, and above all the high cost of extreme behavior. These aspects of American culture are richly illustrated by the novel's two protagonists: Professor Bernard Kovell, a supreme and comical narcissist who dotes on lofty analogies while performing very low acts, and Lenny Pincus, a young radical fishing for more trouble than he can handle.

Download or read book Corridor written by Kate Marshall and published by . This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Corridor" offers a series of conceptually provocative readings that illuminate a hidden and surprising relationship between architectural space and modern American fiction. By paying close attention to fictional descriptions of some of modernityOCOs least remarkable structures, Kate Marshall discovers a rich network of connections between corridors and novels, one that also sheds new light on the nature of modern media.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Twenty First Century American Fiction written by Joshua Miller and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-23 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the most exciting trends in 21st century US fiction's genres, themes, and concepts.

Download or read book Form and Fable in American Fiction written by Daniel Hoffman and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining the disciplines of folklore and literary criticism in his perceptive readings of works by Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, and Mark Twain, Daniel Hoffman demonstrates how these authors transformed materials from both high and popular culture, from their European past and their American present, in works that helped to form our national consciousness. In his new preface, Hoffman describes the evolution of his critical method and suggests the book's value for contemporary readers.

Download or read book The Presidents of American Fiction written by Michael J. Blouin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-11-03 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Presidents of American Fiction brings together American literature, history, and political science to explore the most influential fictionalized accounts of the presidency from the early 19th century to the time of Trump. Of late, popular understandings of the presidency are being radically re-written-consider, for example, the distinctive myths that accompanied the ascent of the Obama and Trump administrations-and many readers of all stripes are radically reimagining the office and its holder. Placing these changes within a broader cultural context, Michael J. Blouin investigates narratives involving fictional presidents, from the supposedly factual to the outright fantastical, within their distinct literary and historical moments. The author considers representative texts including works penned by James Fenimore Cooper from the Jacksonian moment, Gore Vidal in the age of Nixon and Vietnam, and Philip Roth in the neoliberal period. Through detailed readings that question how American presidents function as characters within the popular imagination, this book examines the presidency as a complex, ever-evolving trope, and in so doing enhances our appreciation of American literature's inextricable link with American politics.

Download or read book Longing for an Absent God written by Nick Ripatrazone and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longing for an Absent God unveils the powerful role of faith and doubt in the American literary tradition. Nick Ripatrazone explores how two major strands of Catholic writers--practicing and cultural--intertwine and sustain each other. Ripatrazone explores the writings of devout American Catholic writers in the years before the Second Vatican Council through the work of Flannery O'Connor, J. F. Powers, and Walker Percy; those who were raised Catholic but drifted from the church, such as the Catholic-educated Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy, the convert Toni Morrison, the Mass-going Thomas Pynchon, and the ritual-driven Louise Erdrich; and a new crop of faithful American Catholic writers, including Ron Hansen, Phil Klay, and Alice McDermott, who write Catholic stories for our contemporary world. These critically acclaimed and award-winning voices illustrate that Catholic storytelling is innately powerful and appealing to both secular and religious audiences. Longing for an Absent God demonstrates the profound differences in the storytelling styles and results of these two groups of major writers--but ultimately shows how, taken together, they offer a rich and unique American literary tradition that spans the full spectrum of doubt and faith.