Download or read book The Origin of the Brunists written by Robert Coover and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1969, Robert Coover's first novel instantly established his mastery. A coal-mine explosion in a small mid-American town claims ninety-seven lives. The only survivor, a peculiar man subject to religious visions, is adopted as a prophet and quickly gains a following. Rapidly disseminated through the magic of media exposure, the cult spreads across America, and as its members gather on the Mount of Redemption to await the apocalypse, Robert Coover lays bare the madness of religious frenzy and the sometimes greater madness of normal citizens. The Origin of the Brunists is vintage Coover -- comic, fearless, incisive, and brilliantly executed.
Download or read book Pricksongs and Descants written by Robert Coover and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2000-01-05 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pricksongs & Descants, originally published in 1969, is a virtuoso performance that established its author - already a William Faulkner Award winner for his first novel - as a writer of enduring power and unquestionable brilliance, a promise he has fulfilled over a stellar career. It also began Coover's now-trademark riffs on fairy tales and bedtime stories. In these riotously word-drunk fictional romps, two children follow an old man into the woods, trailing bread crumbs behind and edging helplessly toward a sinister end that never comes; a husband walks toward the bed where his wife awaits his caresses, but by the time he arrives she's been dead three weeks and detectives are pounding down the door; a teenaged babysitter's evening becomes a kaleidoscope of dangerous erotic fantasies-her employer's, her boyfriend's, her own; an aging, humble carpenter marries a beautiful but frigid woman, and after he's waited weeks to consummate their union she announces that God has made her pregnant. Now available in a Grove paperback, Pricksongs & Descants is a cornerstone of Robert Coover's remarkable career and a brilliant work by a major American writer.
Download or read book The Public Burning written by Robert Coover and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vice-President Richard Nixon - the voraciously ambitious bad boy of the Eisenhower regime - is the dominant narrator in an enormous cast that includes Betty Crocker, Joe McCarthy, the Marx Brothers, Walter Winchell, Uncle Sam, his adversary The Phantom, and Time magazine incarnated as the National Poet Laureate. All of these and thousands more converge in Times Square for the carnivalesque auto-da-fe at which the Rosenbergs are put to death.
Download or read book The Universal Baseball Association Inc J Henry Waugh Prop written by Robert Coover and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1992-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Gerald s Party written by Robert Coover and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2011-04-28 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ros is dead. A bad actress but a tremendous lover, when she was alive her thighs pillowed cast members, crew, friends and acquaintances. Now Gerald's party continues around her murdered corpse (it is, after all, just the first of the night), as the guests indulge in drinking, flirting and jealousies, and the police make their brutal investigations. An evening of cocktails, sex and violence, Robert Coover's novel is a murder mystery as rousing and disorienting as the best drunken party, a vaudevillian masterpiece.
Download or read book The Origin of the Brunists written by Robert Coover and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Understanding Robert Coover written by Brian Evenson and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text takes on the work of Robert Coover, a major figure of postmodern metafiction. In an analysis of Coover's short stories and novels, it demonstrates how Coover writes in several different modes that cross over into one another.
Download or read book The Brunist Day of Wrath written by Robert Coover and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 1024 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sequel to Robert Coover's debut novel, the award-winning The Origin of the Brunists
Download or read book Novels and Arguments written by Zahava Karl McKeon and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this absorbing study--the first comprehensive exploration of the rhetoric of the novel--Zahava Karl McKeon investigates the complex interrelations of critical poetics, grammars, dialectics, and rhetorics to devise a systematic means of dealing with the structure of prose works as communicative objects. Using the vocabulary and conceptual resources of Aristotle and Cicero, she pursues this exploration to discover the kinds of arguments that characterize novels, to find a way of distinguishing novels from other discursive wholes, and to discriminate different genres of the novel. McKeon's arguments are supplemented by readings of a variety of texts, including the novels and stories of Gunter Grass, John Fowles, Robert Coover, and Flannery O'Connor.
Download or read book The Metafictional Muse written by Larry McCaffery and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2010-10-12 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: McCaffery interprets the works of three major writers of radically experimental fiction: Robert Coover; Donald Barthelme; and Willam H. Gass. The term "metafiction" here refers to a strain in American writing where the self-concious approach to the art of fiction-making is a commentary on the nature of meaning itself.
Download or read book Robert Coover and the Generosity of the Page written by Stephane Vanderhaeghe and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Coover and the Generosity of the Page is an unconventional study of Robert Coover's work from his early masterpiece The Origin of the Brunists (1966) to the recent Noir (2010). Written in the second person, it offers a self-reflexive investigation into the ways in which Coover's stories often challenge the reader to resist the conventions of sense-making and even literary criticism. By portraying characters lost in surroundings they often fail to grasp, Coover's work playfully enacts a "(melo)drama of cognition" that mirrors the reader's own desire to interpret and make sense of texts in unequivocal ways. This tendency in Coover's writing is indicative of a larger refusal of the ready-made, of the once-and-for-all or the authoritative, celebrating instead, in its generosity, the widening of possibilities—thus inevitably forcing the reader-critic to acknowledge the arbitrariness and artificiality of her responses.
Download or read book The Phenomenology of Religious Belief written by Michael J. Shapiro and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-05-06 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Phenomenology of Religious Belief, the renowned philosopher Michael J. Shapiro investigates how art – and in particular literature and film – can impact upon both traditional interpretations and critical studies of religious beliefs and experiences. In doing so, he examines the work of prolific and award-winning writers such as Toni Morrison, Philip K. Dick and Robert Coover. By placing their work in conjunction with critical analyses of media by the likes of Ingmar Bergman and Pier Paolo Pasolini and combining it with the work of groundbreaking thinkers such as George Canguilhem, Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek, Shapiro takes a truly interdisciplinary approach to the question of how life should be lived. His assessment of phenomenological subjectivity also leads him to question the nature of political theology and extend the criticism of Pauline theology.
Download or read book Apocalyptic Transformation written by Elizabeth K. Rosen and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Apocalyptic Transformation explores how one the oldest sense-making paradigms, the apocalyptic myth, is altered when postmodern authors and filmmakers adopt it. It examines how postmodern writers adapt a fundamentally religious story for a secular audience and it proposes that even as these writers use the myth in traditional ways, they simultaneously undermine and criticize the grand narrative of apocalypse itself.
Download or read book Preserving the Spell written by Armando Maggi and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-07-21 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once upon a time, glass slippers, poison apples, evil stepmothers, fairy godmothers, and princes charming exerted a magnetic hold, cast a magic spell, on adults and children alike. Real-life anxieties fostered a need for stories that assuage. But the world changes, and Maggi asks here whether fairy tales have found a way to transform themselves to keep up. He says no, they haven t. The genre of fairy tale has become contaminated, it has been entitized, like processed food, fossilized as Disney-esque icons. We need to rediscover the marvelous, the oneiric trance of dazzling dreams or horrid torments. We need a new mythic lens to help us understand reality, but to chart what that might be, it is necessary to understand the history of the various traditions of oral and written narrative that intersect with each other across time and space. He goes to Giambattista Basile for the Ur fairy tales, with a special focus on the emblematic Cupid and Psyche myth, an anchor for Maggi s wide-ranging investigation of essential variations on fairy tales (with oppositions of beauty/ugly, human/divine, apparent/real). The transformations of later Italian, French, English, and German traditions come to a head with the Brothers Grimm in 19t-century Germany. Maggi brilliantly weaves the traditions into the 20th century, in memoirs such as those by Joan Didion, in postmodern novels such as Robert Coover s, and, in a final manifestation, in the convulsively, bleakly beautiful movie, "Beasts of the Southern Wild." This book offers profound reflections on reading fairy tales, on the inherent human need for narrative-myth (and, ultimately, for hope), showing us why we tell tales and how these stories transform over time. He offers, in an appendix, the first translation of the original Grimm edition of Basile s 50 tales."
Download or read book In a Dark Time written by Joseph Dewey and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What was gunpowder?" Trivial. What was electricity? Meaningless. This atomic bomb is the Second Coming in wrath." - Winston Churchill, July 1945 Commencing earnestly in the1960s, the American novel began its exploration into how mankind could adjustto life in the shadow of the mushroom cloud, how we could begin to think aboutthe Unthinkable. American writers faced squarely the age birthed by nuclearphysics and found in its very darkness difficult avenues to hope byrediscovering that most potent, traditional response to a history in crisis:the apocalyptic temper. Dewey focuses on seven novelsthat touch the variety of generic experiments and postures of the post-WorldWar II American novel. These novels by Vonnegut, Coover, Percy, Pynchon,Gaddis, and DeLillo represent a significant argument concerning the Americanliterary response to living within the oppressive technologies of the NuclearAge. Departing from other studies that veer toward speculative fiction ortoward the more narrowly defined religious angles, In a Dark Time defines the apocalyptic temper as a most traditionalliterary genre that articulates the anxieties of a community in crisis, a wayfor that community to respond to the perception of a history gone critical byturning squarely to that history and to find, in that gesture, the way toward agenuine hope. Dewey's new approach consistsof applying the theory of apocalyptic literature to a body of essentiallysecular writings. Dewey resists the traditional approach - studying worksdealing with nuclear devastation - to focus on how a generation of literaryresponses have dealt with the larger questions about how to live with therecognition of End times. Dewey convincingly demonstrates that this literaturereminds its moments in history that only in a dark time will the eye begin tosee.
Download or read book Writers and Miners written by David C. Duke and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coal miners evoke admiration and sympathy from the public, and writers—some seeking a muse, others a cause—traditionally champion them. David C. Duke explores more than one hundred years of this tradition in literature, poetry, drama, and film. Duke argues that as most writers spoke about rather than to the mining community, miners became stock characters in an industrial morality play, robbed of individuality or humanity. He discusses activist-writers such as John Reed, Theodore Dreiser, and Denise Giardina, who assisted striking workers, and looks at the writing of miners themselves. He examines portrayals of miners from The Trail of the Lonesome Pine to Matewan and The Kentucky Cycle. The most comprehensive study on the subject to date, Writers and Miners investigates the vexed political and creative relationship between activists and artists and those they seek to represent.
Download or read book Twentieth Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context 4 volumes written by Linda De Roche and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-06-04 with total page 2067 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This four-volume reference work surveys American literature from the early 20th century to the present day, featuring a diverse range of American works and authors and an expansive selection of primary source materials. Bringing useful and engaging material into the classroom, this four-volume set covers more than a century of American literary history—from 1900 to the present. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context profiles authors and their works and provides overviews of literary movements and genres through which readers will understand the historical, cultural, and political contexts that have shaped American writing. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context provides wide coverage of authors, works, genres, and movements that are emblematic of the diversity of modern America. Not only are major literary movements represented, such as the Beats, but this work also highlights the emergence and development of modern Native American literature, African American literature, and other representative groups that showcase the diversity of American letters. A rich selection of primary documents and background material provides indispensable information for student research.
