Download or read book Silko Morrison and Roth written by Naomi R. Rand and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1999 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines six longer works by the three contemporary American writers to identify a common form of narrative that balances a longing for inclusion into mainstream society with a deep-seated anger toward it. Also shows how the protagonists exhibit many of the key traits that have been described as elements of the survivor's psyche. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book The Critical Life of Toni Morrison written by Susan Neal Mayberry and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2021 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to trace the critical reception of the great African American woman writer, attending not only to her fiction but to her nonfiction and critical writings.
Download or read book The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction written by Catherine Morley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-09-25 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the confluences between two types of literature in contemporary America: the novel and the epic. It analyses the tradition of the epic as it has evolved from antiquity, through Joyce to its American manifestations and describes how this tradition has impacted upon contemporary American writing.
Download or read book Understanding Philip Roth written by Murray Baumgarten and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The main aim of this work is to provide a comprehensive guide to the major writings of Philip Roth, articulating the overlapping contexts of his fiction. Dealing with the range of Roth's work - starting with Goodbye, Columbus in 1959, and including works from the 1960s and 1970s such as When She was Good, Portnoy's Complaint and My Life as a Man to The Counterlife in 1987 - this analytic study elaborates the course of his career as a major western writer who responds to the modern situation, the contemporary Jewish and ethnic predicament, the problems of gender and American literary, social and political history.
Download or read book Leslie Marmon Silko written by Mary Ellen Snodgrass and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This companion, appropriate for the lay reader and researcher alike, provides analysis of characters, plots, humor, symbols, philosophies, and classic themes from the writings and tellings of Leslie Marmon Silko, the celebrated novelist, poet, memoirist and Native American wisewoman. The text opens with an annotated chronology of Silko's multiracial heritage, life and works, followed by a family tree of the Leslie-Marmon families that clarifies relationships of the people who fill her autobiographical musings. In the main text, 87 A-to-Z entries combine literary and cultural commentary with generous citations from primary and secondary sources and comparisons to classic and popular literature. Back matter includes a glossary of Pueblo terms and a list of 43 questions for research, writing projects, and discussion. This much-needed text will aid both scholars and casual readers interested in the work and career of the first internationally-acclaimed native woman author in the United States.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth written by Timothy Parrish and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-04 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the moment that his debut book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), won him the National Book Award, Philip Roth has been among the most influential and controversial writers of our age. Now the author of more than twenty novels, numerous stories, two memoirs, and two books of literary criticism, Roth has used his writing to continually reinvent himself and in doing so to remake the American literary landscape. This Companion provides the most comprehensive introduction to his works and thought in a collection of newly commissioned essays from distinguished scholars. Beginning with the urgency of Roth's early fiction and extending to the vitality of his most recent novels, these essays trace Roth's artistic engagement with questions about ethnic identity, postmodernism, Israel, the Holocaust, sexuality, and the human psyche itself. With its chronology and guide to further reading, this Companion will be essential for new and returning Roth readers, students and scholars.
Download or read book Magical American Jew written by Aaron Tillman and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Efforts to describe contemporary Jewish American identities often reveal more questions than concrete articulations, more statements about what Jewish Americans are not than what they are. Highlighting the paradoxical phrasings that surface in contemporary writings about Jewish American literature and culture—language that speaks to the elusive difference felt by many Jewish Americans—Aaron Tillman asks how we portray identities and differences that seem to resist concrete definition. Over the course of Magical American Jew, Tillman examines this enigma—the indefinite yet undeniable difference that informs contemporary Jewish American identity—demonstrating how certain writers and filmmakers have deployed magical realist techniques to illustrate the enigmatic difference that Jewish Americans have felt and continue to feel. Similar to the indeterminate nature of Jewish American identity, magical realism is marked by paradox and does not fit easily into any singular category. Often characterized as a mode of literary expression, rather than a genre within literature, magical realism has been the subject of debates about definition, origin, and application. After elucidating the features of the mode, Tillman illustrates how it enables uniquely cogent portrayals of enigmatic elements of difference. Concentrating on a diverse selection of Jewish American short fiction and film—including works by Woody Allen, Sarah Silverman, Cynthia Ozick, Nathan Englander, Steve Stern, and Melvin Jules Bukiet— Magical American Jew covers a range of subjects, from archiving Holocaust testimony to satirical Jewish American humor. Shedding light on aspects of media, marginalization, excess, and many other facets of contemporary American society, the study concludes by addressing the ways that the magical realist mode has been and can be used to examine U.S. ethnic literatures more broadly.
Download or read book The Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Fiction 3 Volume Set written by Brian W. Shaffer and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-01-18 with total page 1581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Encyclopedia offers an indispensable reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English-language. With nearly 500 contributors and over one million words, it is the most comprehensive and authoritative reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English language. Contains over 500 entries of 1000-3000 words written in lucid, jargon-free prose, by an international cast of leading scholars Arranged in three volumes covering British and Irish Fiction, American Fiction, and World Fiction, with each volume edited by a leading scholar in the field Entries cover major writers (such as Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, A.S. Byatt, Samual Beckett, D.H. Lawrence, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Alice Munro, Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, and Ngûgî Wa Thiong’o) and their key works Examines the genres and sub-genres of fiction in English across the twentieth century (including crime fiction, Sci-Fi, chick lit, the noir novel, and the avant-garde novel) as well as the major movements, debates, and rubrics within the field, such as censorship, globalization, modernist fiction, fiction and the film industry, and the fiction of migration, diaspora, and exile
Download or read book The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction written by Darryl Dickson-Carr and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005-10-14 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison to Colson Whitehead and Terry McMillan, Darryl Dickson-Carr offers a definitive guide to contemporary African American literature. This volume-the only reference work devoted exclusively to African American fiction of the last thirty-five years-presents a wealth of factual and interpretive information about the major authors, texts, movements, and ideas that have shaped contemporary African American fiction. In more than 160 concise entries, arranged alphabetically, Dickson-Carr discusses the careers, works, and critical receptions of Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Jamaica Kincaid, Charles Johnson, John Edgar Wideman, Leon Forrest, as well as other prominent and lesser-known authors. Each entry presents ways of reading the author's works, identifies key themes and influences, assesses the writer's overarching significance, and includes sources for further research. Dickson-Carr addresses the influence of a variety of literary movements, critical theories, and publishers of African American work. Topics discussed include the Black Arts Movement, African American postmodernism, feminism, and the influence of hip-hop, the blues, and jazz on African American novelists. In tracing these developments, Dickson-Carr examines the multitude of ways authors have portrayed the diverse experiences of African Americans. The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction situates African American fiction in the social, political, and cultural contexts of post-Civil Rights era America: the drug epidemics of the 1980s and 1990s and the concomitant "war on drugs," the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, the struggle for gay rights, feminism, the rise of HIV/AIDS, and racism's continuing effects on African American communities. Dickson-Carr also discusses the debates and controversies regarding the role of literature in African American life. The volume concludes with an extensive annotated bibliography of African American fiction and criticism.
Download or read book Midamerica written by and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Toni Morrison s Beloved written by William L. Andrews and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1999 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the continued expansion of the literary canon, multicultural works of modern literary fiction and autobiography have assumed an increasing importance for students and scholars of American literature. This exciting new series assembles key documents and criticism concerning these works that have so recently become central components of the American literature curriculum. Each casebook will reprint documents relating to the work's historical context and reception, present the best in critical essays, and when possible, feature an interview of the author. The series will provide, for the first time, an accessible forum in which readers can come to a fuller understanding of these contemporary masterpieces and the unique aspects of American ethnic, racial, or cultural experience that they so ably portray. This casebook to Morrison's classic novel presents seven essays that represent the best in contemporary criticism of the book. In addition, the book includes a poem and an abolitionist's tract published after a slave named Margaret Garner killed her child to save her from slavery--the very incident Morrison fictionalizes in Beloved.
Download or read book The Lever of Riches written by Joel Mokyr and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1992-04-09 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a world of supercomputers, genetic engineering, and fiber optics, technological creativity is ever more the key to economic success. But why are some nations more creative than others, and why do some highly innovative societies--such as ancient China, or Britain in the industrial revolution--pass into stagnation? Beginning with a fascinating, concise history of technological progress, Mokyr sets the background for his analysis by tracing the major inventions and innovations that have transformed society since ancient Greece and Rome. What emerges from this survey is often surprising: the classical world, for instance, was largely barren of new technology, the relatively backward society of medieval Europe bristled with inventions, and the period between the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution was one of slow and unspectacular progress in technology, despite the tumultuous developments associated with the Voyages of Discovery and the Scientific Revolution. What were the causes of technological creativity? Mokyr distinguishes between the relationship of inventors and their physical environment--which determined their willingness to challenge nature--and the social environment, which determined the openness to new ideas. He discusses a long list of such factors, showing how they interact to help or hinder a nation's creativity, and then illustrates them by a number of detailed comparative studies, examining the differences between Europe and China, between classical antiquity and medieval Europe, and between Britain and the rest of Europe during the industrial revolution. He examines such aspects as the role of the state (the Chinese gave up a millennium-wide lead in shipping to the Europeans, for example, when an Emperor banned large ocean-going vessels), the impact of science, as well as religion, politics, and even nutrition. He questions the importance of such commonly-cited factors as the spill-over benefits of war, the abundance of natural resources, life expectancy, and labor costs. Today, an ever greater number of industrial economies are competing in the global market, locked in a struggle that revolves around technological ingenuity. The Lever of Riches, with its keen analysis derived from a sweeping survey of creativity throughout history, offers telling insights into the question of how Western economies can maintain, and developing nations can unlock, their creative potential.
Download or read book The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature written by William L. Andrews and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001-02-15 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Contested Boundaries written by Maxine L. Montgomery and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-10-03 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contested Boundaries aims to map the space between A Mercy, Toni Morrison’s ninth and arguably most enigmatic novel, and the fiction comprising the author’s multiple-text canon. The volume accomplishes this through the inclusion of eight original essays representing a range of critical approaches that trouble narrative boundaries demarcating the novels included in Morrison’s evolving opus, with A Mercy serving as a locus for discussion of her re-figuration of concerns central to her narrative project. Issues relevant to the conflicted mother-child relationship, the haunting legacy of slavery, the black female body as a site of trauma, the thorny quest for an idealized home, the perilous transatlantic journey, the demands associated with love, and, yes, the desire for mercy recur, but they do so with a difference, a “Morrisonian” twist that demands close intellectual scrutiny. Essays included in this volume are invested in a persistent scholarly investigation of this narrative and rhetorical play. The publication of A Mercy represents a climactic moment in Morrison’s evolving political consciousness, her fictional geography, and, consequently, a shift in the margins marking her multiple-text universe. The complicated markers of difference figuring in “Recitatif” and continuing with Paradise and Love culminate in the author’s ninth work of fiction. This volume ventures to chart that change, not for the sake of encoding it, but in an effort to open up new ways of interrogating her writing.
Download or read book Studies in American Jewish Literature written by and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Toni Morrison written by Jill L. Matus and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1998-09-15 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an illuminating and original introduction to Toni Morrison's fiction, focusing on its engagement with African-American history and the way the traumas of the collective past shape Morrison's work. Jill Matus approaches Morrison's fiction as a form of cultural memory concerned with obscured or erased history. She argues that Morrison sees African-American history--from the times of slavery to the continued racial oppressions of the twentieth century--as a history of traumatic experience, and explores how this powerful storyteller bears witness to a painful yet richly enlivening past. Morrison's novels are known for their great lyric power, but they often dwell on scenes of horror, and Matus emphasizes the uneasy relations of memory, pain and pleasure in literature. In doing so, she sheds new light on Morrison as a contemporary writer working at a time when literature is being urgently explored for its capacity to memorialize and testify. Direct and accessible, this critical study highlights the political and historical contexts of Morrison's work, offers close readings of each of the novels, and concludes with a critical overview of the field of Morrison studies.
Download or read book Atenea written by and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 832 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
