Sherman Alexie by
Sherman Alexie is, by many accounts, the most widely read American Indian writer in the United States and likely in the world. A literary polymath, Alexie's nineteen published books span a variety of genres and include his most recent National Book Award-winning The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Now, for the first time, a volume of critical essays is devoted to Alexie's work both in print and on the big screen. Editors Jeff Berglund and Jan Roush have assembled twelve leading scholars of American Indian literature to provide new perspectives on a writer with his finger on the pulse of America. Interdisciplinary in their approach to Alexie's work, these essays cover the writer's entire career, and are insightful and accessible to scholars and lay readers alike. This volume is a worthy companion to the work of one of our nations's most recognized contemporary voices.
That Dream Shall Have a Name by
The founding idea of "America" has been based largely on the expected sweeping away of Native Americans to make room for EuroAmericans and their cultures. In this authoritative study, David L. Moore examines the works of five well-known Native American writers and their efforts, beginning in the colonial period, to redefine an "America" and "American identity" that includes Native Americans. That Dream Shall Have a Name focuses on the writing of Pequot Methodist minister William Apess in the 1830s; on Northern Paiute activist Sarah Winnemucca in the 1880s; on Salish/Métis novelist, historian, and activist D'Arcy McNickle in the 1930s; and on Laguna poet and novelist Leslie Marmon Silko and on Spokane poet, novelist, humorist, and filmmaker Sherman Alexie, both in the latter twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Moore studies these five writers' stories about the conflicted topics of sovereignty, community, identity, and authenticity--always tinged with irony and often with humor. He shows how Native Americans have tried from the beginning to shape an American narrative closer to its own ideals, one that does not include the death and destruction of their peoples. This compelling work offers keen insights into the relationships between Native and American identity and politics in a way that is both accessible to newcomers and compelling to those already familiar with these fields of study.
Ambrose Bierce and the Dance of Death by
Ambrose Bierce and the Dance of Death uses psychoanalytic theory in combination with historical, cultural, and literary contexts to examine the complex motif of death in a full range of Bierce's writings. Scholarly interest in Bierce, whose work has long been undervalued, has grown significantly in recent years. This new book contributes to the ongoing reassessment by providing new contexts for joining the texts in his canon in meaningful ways. Previous attempts to consider Bierce from a psychological perspective have been superficial, often reductive Freudian readings of individual stories such as "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and "The Death of Halpin Frayser." This new volume not only updates these interpretations with insights from post-Freudian theorists but uses contemporary death theory as a framework to analyze the sources and expressions of Bierce's attitudes about death and dying. This approach makes it possible to discern links among texts that resolve some of the still puzzling ambiguities that have--until now--precluded a fuller understanding of both the man and his writings. Lively and engaging, Ambrose Bierce and the Dance of Death adds valuable new insights not only to the study of Bierce but to that of nineteenth-century American literature in general.
Anton Chekhov by
Anton Chekhovoffers a critical introduction to the plays and productions of this canonical playwright, examining the genius of Chekhov's writing, theatrical representation and dramatic philosophy. Emphasising Chekhov's continued relevance and his mastery of the tragicomic, Rose Whyman provides an insightful assessment of his life and work. All of Chekhov's major dramas are analysed, in addition to his vaudevilles, one-act plays and stories. The works are studied in relation to traditional criticism and more recent theoretical and cultural standpoints, including cultural materialism, philosophy and gender studies. Analysis of key historical and recent productions, display the development of the drama, as well as the playwright's continued appeal. Anton Chekhovprovides readers with an accessible comparative study of the relationship between Chekhov's life, work and ideological thought.
Anton Chekhov Through the Eyes of Russian Thinkers by
The collection is comprised of twelve scholarly essays written by leading Chekhov specialists from around the world, each analysing an interpretation of Chekhov by one of three Russian thinkers of the Silver Age of Russian culture - Vasilii Rozanov, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Lev Shestov. It thus examines the hitherto under-researched relationship between the origins and the results of the cultural phase that came to be known as the Silver Age, and focuses specifically on the complex connections betweens Chekhov's legacy and the Russian culture of that period.
Stephen Crane by
With the exception of Poe, no American writer has proven as challenging to biographers as the author of The Red Badge of Courage. Stephen Crane's short, compact life-"a life of fire," he called it-continues to be surrounded by myths and half-truths, distortions and outright fabrications. Mindful of the pitfalls that have marred previous biographies, Paul Sorrentino has sifted through garbled chronologies and contradictory eyewitness accounts, scoured the archives, and followed in Crane's footsteps. The result is the most complete and accurate account of the poet and novelist written to date. Whether Crane was dressing as a hobo to document the life of the homeless in the Bowery, defending a prostitute against corrupt New York City law enforcement, or covering the historic charge up the San Juan hills as a correspondent during the Spanish-American War, his adventures were front-page news. From Sorrentino's layered narrative of the various phases of Crane's life a portrait slowly emerges. By turns garrulous and taciturn, confident and insecure, romantic and cynical, Crane was a man of irresolvable contradictions. He rebelled against tradition yet was proud of his family heritage; he lived a Bohemian existence yet was drawn to social status; he romanticized women yet obsessively sought out prostitutes; he spurned a God he saw as remote yet wished for His presence. Incorporating decades of research by the foremost authority on Crane's work, Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire sets a new benchmark for biographers.
Tender Is the Night and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Sentimental Identities by
In this fascinating study, Chris Messenger posits F. Scott Fitzgerald as a great master of sentiment in modern American fiction. Sentimental forms both attracted and repelled Fitzgerald while defining his deepest impulses as a prose writer. Messenger demonstrates that the sentimental identities, refractions, and influences Fitzgerald explores in Tender Is the Night define key components in his affective life, which evolved into a powerful aesthetic that informed his vocation as a modernist writer. In "Tender Is the Night" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Sentimental Identities, Messenger traces the roots of Fitzgerald's writing career to the deaths of his two infant sisters a few months before his own birth. It was their loss, Fitzgerald wrote, that made him a writer. Messenger highlights how the loss of Fitzgerald's siblings powerfully molded his relation to maternal nurturing and sympathy in Tender Is the Night as well as how it shaped the homosocial intimations of its care-giving protagonist, psychiatrist Dick Diver. A concomitant grief and mourning was fueled by Fitzgerald's intimate and intense creative rivalry with his often-institutionalized wife, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. While sentiment is a discredited strain in high modernism, Fitzgerald nevertheless embraced it in Tender Is the Night to fashion this most poignant and beautiful successor to The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald's aesthetic and emotional preoccupations came most vividly to life in this major novel. Messenger describes how Fitzgerald, creating his character Nicole Warren Diver as a victim of paternal incest, finally found the sentimental key to finishing his novel and uniting his vision of the two narratives of "saving" the two sisters and reimagining the agony of his wife and their marriage. Fitzgerald's productive quarrel with and through sentiment defines his career, and Messenger convincingly argues that Tender Is the Night should be placed alongside TheGreat Gatsby as a classic exemplar of the modern novel.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's Fiction by
"Fitzgerald's work has always deeply moved me," writes John T. Irwin. "And this is as true now as it was fifty years ago when I first picked up The Great Gatsby. I can still remember the occasions when I first read each of his novels; remember the time, place, and mood of those early readings, as well as the way each work seemed to speak to something going on in my life at that moment. Because the things that interested Fitzgerald were the things that interested me and because there seemed to be so many similarities in our backgrounds, his work always possessed for me a special, personal authority; it became a form of wisdom, a way of knowing the world, its types, its classes, its individuals." In his personal tribute to Fitzgerald's novels and short stories, Irwin offers an intricate vision of one of the most important writers in the American canon. The third in Irwin's trilogy of works on American writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald's Fiction resonates back through all of his previous writings, both scholarly and poetic, returning to Fitzgerald's ongoing theme of the twentieth-century American protagonist's conflict between his work and his personal life. This conflict is played out against the typically American imaginative activity of self-creation, an activity that involves a degree of theatrical ability on the protagonist's part as he must first enact the role imagined for himself, which is to say, the self he means to invent. The work is suffused with elements of both Fitzgerald's and Irwin's biographies, and Irwin's immense erudition is on display throughout. Irwin seamlessly ties together details from Fitzgerald's life with elements from his entire body of work and considers central themes connected to wealth, class, work, love, jazz, acceptance, family, disillusionment, and life as theatrical performance.
F. Scott Fitzgerald by
Years after his death, F. Scott Fitzgerald continues to captivate both the popular and the critical imagination. This collection of essays presents fresh insights into his writing, discussing neglected texts and approaching familiar works from new perspectives. Seventeen scholarly articles deal not only with Fitzgerald's novels but with his stories and essays as well, considering such topics as the Roman Catholic background of The Beautiful and Damned and the influence of Mark Twain on Fitzgerald's work and self-conception. The volume also features four personal essays by Fitzgerald's friends Budd Schulberg, Frances Kroll Ring, publisher Charles Scribner III, and writer George Garrett that shed new light on his personal and professional lives. Together these contributions demonstrate the continued vitality of Fitzgerald's work and establish new directions for ongoing discussions of his life and writing.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Short Stories As Social Criticism by 
Susan Glaspell by
Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist, founding member of the Provincetown Players, best-selling novelist and award-winning short fiction writer, Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) has been recovered from the marginalization of women writers that took place in the post-war period of canon-formation in America. Her recovery, begun by feminist critics and theatre historians in the 1980s, reached a milestone with the 1995 publication of the first collection of critical essays, Susan Glaspell: Essays on Her Theater and Fiction, edited by Linda Ben-Zvi. Since then scholarship has been exploding, with six major books on Glaspell and her work published since the year 2000, several by authors represented here. While Glaspell's work with the Provincetown Players, 1915-1922, was crucial for the development of American theatre, scholars are now fully realizing the extent to which her stories and novels, as well as all of her plays, reflect a deep engagement with the major literary movements and political events of her age. A realist concerned with issues of social justice and a modernist committed to exploring the psyche, Glaspell through her art provides thoughtful commentary, not only on feminist issues of women and gender, but on war, class, socialism, idealism, aesthetics, ethics and law. Susan Glaspell: New Directions in Critical Inquiry continues the tradition started by Ben-Zvi and brings it up to date, featuring new work in various post-structural critical approaches from leading Glaspell scholars, including Americanists Mary E. Papke and Kristina Hinz-Bode; legal scholar, Patricia L. Bryan; cultural historian, J. Ellen Gainor; feminist biographer, Barbara Ozieblo; performance artist, Lucia V. Sander; and classicist Marie Molnar. Praise for the book: Professor Carpentier's study of Glaspell's fiction stands as the most important work on the subject and has led to a renewed interest in the subject. There is growing interest in Glaspell's writing, and this book should find a solid readership from the following fields: American drama and fiction studies, American studies, Women's studies, and Cultural Studies. I fully support the project and encourage your press to publish it. Linda Ben-Zvi, Professor of Theatre Studies, Tel Aviv Unviesrity
Susan Glaspell in Context by
Susan Glaspell in Context not only discusses the dramatic work of this key American author -- perhaps best known for her short story "A Jury of Her Peers" and its dramatic counterpart, Trifles -- but also places it within the theatrical, cultural, political, social, historical, and biographical climates in which Glaspell's dramas were created: the worlds of Greenwich Village and Provincetown bohemia, of the American frontier, and of American modernism. J. Ellen Gainor is Professor of Theatre, Women's Studies, and American Studies, Cornell University. Her other books include Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater (co-edited with Jeffrey D. Mason) from the University of Michigan Press.
Shirley Jackson's American Gothic by
Argues that Jackson's anticipation of postmodernism ranks her among the most significant writers of her time.
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka's visionary fiction offers an unforgettable rendering of the anxiety and alienation prevalent in 20th-century Western society. ""The Trial"" and ""The Metamorphosis"" are among the works discussed in this new collection of contemporary critical commentary on the author. This new offering from Bloom's ""Modern Critical Views"" includes an introductory essay from esteemed scholar Harold Bloom, a bibliography, a chronology of the author's life, and an index for quick reference. Each title in this series presents a well-rounded critical portrait of an influential writer by examining his or her body of work through eight to 12 full-length essays.
Franz Kafka (1883-1983) by
The eight papers in this volume were originally presented at the centennial conference on Franz Kafka held at the University of Calgary in October 1983. As diverse in approach and methodology as these papers are "the general drift of the volume is away from Germanistik towards 'state-of-the-art' methods." The opening articles by Charles Bernheimer and James Rolleston both deal with the similarities and contrasts between Kafka and Flaubert, with Bernheimer focusing on the "I" and the dilemma of narration in Kafka's early story, "Wedding Preparation in the Country," and Rolleston on the time-dimensions in the Kafka's work that link him to the Romantics. Other articles in the volume deal with the complex interrelationships between author and narrator, and implied author and implied reader; with Kafka's place in the European fable tradition and in classic and Romantic religious traditions; with Kafka's diaries; and with his female protagonists.
Lambent Traces by
On the night of September 22, 1912, Franz Kafka wrote his story "The Judgment," which came out of him "like a regular birth." This act of creation struck him as an unmistakable sign of his literary destiny. Thereafter, the search of many of his characters for the Law, for a home, for artistic fulfillment can be understood as a figure for Kafka's own search to reproduce the ecstasy of a single night. In Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka, the preeminent American critic and translator of Franz Kafka traces the implications of Kafka's literary breakthrough. Kafka's first concern was not his responsibility to his culture but to his fate as literature, which he pursued by exploring "the limits of the human." At the same time, he kept his transcendental longings sober by noting--with incomparable irony--their virtual impossibility. At times Kafka's passion for personal transcendence as a writer entered into a torturous and witty conflict with his desire for another sort of transcendence, one driven by a modern Gnosticism. This struggle prompted him continually to scrutinize different kinds of mediation, such as confessional writing, the dream, the media, the idea of marriage, skepticism, asceticism, and the imitation of death. Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka concludes with a reconstruction and critique of the approaches to Kafka by such major critics as Adorno, Gilman, and Deleuze and Guattari..
Jack London by
Jack London (1876-1916) found fame with his wolf-dog tales and sagas of the frozen North, but Cecelia Tichi challenges the long-standing view of London as merely a mass-market producer of potboilers. A onetime child laborer, London led a life of poverty in the Gilded Age before rising to worldwide acclaim for stories, novels, and essays designed to hasten the social, economic, and political advance of America. In this major reinterpretation of London's career, Tichi examines how the beloved writer leveraged his written words as a force for the future. Tracing the arc of London's work from the late 1800s through the 1910s, Tichi profiles the writer's allies and adversaries in the cities, on the factory floor, inside prison walls, and in the farmlands. Thoroughly exploring London's importance as an artist and as a political and public figure, Tichi brings to life a man who merits recognition as one of America's foremost public intellectuals. The enhanced e-book edition of Jack London features significant archival motion picture footage.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez by
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 for his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garc^D'ia M^D'arquez had already earned tremendous respect and popularity in the years leading up to that honor, and remains, to date, an active and prolific writer. Readers are introduced to Garc^D'ia M^D'arquez with a vivid account of his fascinating life; from his friendships with poets and presidents, to his distinguished career as a journalist, novelist, and chronicler of the quintessential Latin American experience. This companion also helps students situate Garc^D'ia M^D'arquez within the canon of Western literature, exploring his contributions to the modern novel in general, and his forging of literary techniques, particularly magic realism, that have come to distinguish Latin American fiction. Full literary analysis is given for One Hundred Years of Solitude, as well as Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), two additional novels, and five of Garc^D'ia M^D'arquez's best short stories. Students are given guidance in understanding the historical contexts, as well as the characters and themes that recur in these interrelated works. Narrative technique and alternative critical perspectives are also explored for each work, helping readers fully appreciate the literary accomplishments of Gabriel Garc^D'ia M^D'arquez.
Bloom's How to Write about Gabriel García Márquez by
The works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez attracts the interest of both historians and literary critics as his fiction has helped bring greater exposure of Latin American culture to the rest of the world. Editor Harold Bloom cites the literary origins of Marquez as being 'Faulkner, crossed by Kafka.' The Colombian writer and Nobel Prize winner's best-known works, including ""One Hundred Years of Solitude"", ""Love in the Time of Cholera"", and ""The General in His Labyrinth"", are explored in-depth in this indispensable resource. Students of literature will find tips for writing effective essays on Marquez and his works.
Complete Critical Guide to D. H. Lawrence by
So many questions surround the key figures in the English literary canon, but most books focus on one aspect of an author's life or work, or limit themselves to a single critical approach. D. H. Lawrenceis a comprehensive, user-friendly guide which: * offers basic information on Lawrence's, contexts and works * outlines the major critical issues surrounding his works, from the time they were written to the present * explain the full range of often very different critical views and interpretation * offer guides to further reading in each area discussed. This guidebook has a broad focus but one very clear aim: to equip you with all the knowledge you need to make your own new readings of the work of D. H. Lawrence.
D. H. Lawrence by
The importance of the work of D. H. Lawrence in the field of ecology and environmental awareness has been largely overlooked. LaChapelle argues that Lawrence deserves to be ranked alongside Thoreau and Muir. Beginning with the effect of Lawrence's childhood near Sherwood Forest, LaChapelle explores the intense relationship Lawrence had with all of nature so that his senses were as fully developed as those of a primitive hunter.
D. H. Lawrence and Survival by
Although Darwin's ideas about evolution were dominant in D.H. Lawrence's day, little scholarly work has been done on the influence of these concepts on his work. This work argues that Lawrence employed ideas based on evolution in his fiction, particularly during the transition between his marriage and leadership periods (1919-22) when he embarked on a major rethinking of the direction of his creative work, and that these ideas contributed to the deterioration in his fiction after Women in Love. The book shows that Lawrence's deliberate use of Darwinian elements in his narrative strategy occurred at a time when he was increasingly concerned about survival, both personally, due to illness, and as an artist. The result in his fiction is a subtext in which his anxieties are projected onto female characters and the evolution of his writing is frustrated by unresolved emotional conflicts. Through new readings of the major fiction of Lawrence's transitional period, Ronald Granofsky demonstrates that Lawrence's deterioration as a writer and the misogyny of his later work was primarily the result of a deliberate effort on his part to move the ideological yardsticks of his fiction.
Stephen Leacock by
From the preface: "Stephen Leacock is still often regarded as a writer of lightweight amusements and unchallenging satire, as an author without an imaginative centre who lacked a vision of sufficient power and clarity to sustain a lifetime of serious writing. According to this view, which has been too easily received, Leacock squandered an early, promising talent (though he was in fact, middle-aged when he published Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town in 1912), and consequently his writings, like his legendary Lord Ronald, "rode madly off in all directions." After years of chasing down Leacock's numerous literary mounts, I can assert that none of this is true. Leacock's writing emerges from a centre that is the confluence of the two traditions of humanism and toryism, traditions that found in Leacock fertile ground for the propagation of such qualities as tolerance of human fallibility and acceptance of social responsibility. What is remarkable with respect to Leacock's literary output is that even his furthest-flung, seemingly inconsequential humourous pieces move in relation to this tory-humanist centre." Lynch invites us to accompany him on an odyssey through Leacock's two main works, Sunshine Sketches and Arcadian Adventures of the Idle Rich ... He aspires to enlighten the open-minded reader, and is highly successful in doing so." Elspeth Cameron, Coordinator of Canadian Literature and Language Program, New College, University of Toronto
The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien
This collection of stories from Tim O'Brien paints an often-brutal portrait of soldiers' lives during the Vietnam War. More than two decades after its initial publication, this new classic of American fiction is being featured for the first time in the long-running Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations series. Complete with an introduction from the venerable Harold Bloom, and featuring a chronology of O'Brien's life, a bibliography of his works, and an index for reference, this volume of critical essays is a valuable source for students of literature studying The Things They Carried.
Vietnam and Beyond by
This is a comprehensive, in-depth study of one of the most thought-provoking writers of the Vietnam war generation. This volume breaks away from previous readings of O'Brien's development as a trauma artist and an outspoken chronicler of the American involvement in Vietnam: its thematic,rather than chronological, approach contextualizes O'Brien's work beyond the confines of war literature. The necessary exploration of O'Brien's recurrent engagement with the conflict in Vietnam leads to a thorough discussion of the writer's revision of key American (and western) ideas and concerns:the association between courage, heroism and masculinity, the celebration of the pioneering spirit in the frontier narrative, the sense of superiority in the encounter with foreign civilizations, the fraught relationship between power and truth, or reality and imagination, and the attempt and theright to speak about unspeakable events. All these themes, as Ciocia illustrates, highlight O'Brien's compelling preoccupation with the role and the ethical responsibility of the storyteller. With his clear privileging of "story-truth' over "happening-truth", O'Brien makes a bold, serious investment in the power of fiction, as testified byhis formal experimentations, metanarrative reflections and sustained meditations on matters such as individual agency, moral accountability and authenticity. Approached from this fresh perspective, O'Brien emerges as a figure deserving to find a wider audience and demanding renewed scholarlyattention for his remarkable achievements as a contemporary mythographer, an acute observer of the human condition and a sharp critic of American culture.
Wits End by
In Wit's End, Sean Zwagerman offers an original perspective on women's use of humor as a performative strategy as seen in works of twentieth-century American literature. He argues that women whose direct, explicit performative speech has been traditionally denied, or not taken seriously, have often turned to humor as a means of communicating with men. The book examines both the potential and limits of women's humor as a rhetorical strategy in the writings of James Thurber, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy Parker, Edward Albee, Louise Erdrich, and others. For Zwagerman, these texts "talk back" to important arguments in humor studies and speech-act theory. He deconstructs the use of humor in select passages by employing the theories of J. L. Austin, John Searle, Jacques Derrida, Shoshana Felman, J. Hillis Miller, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Zwagerman offers arguments both for and against these approaches while advancing new thinking on humor as the "end"--both the goal and limit--of performative strategy, and as a means of expressing a full range of serious purposes. Zwagerman contends that women's humor is not solely a subversive act, but instead it should be viewed in the total speech situation through context, motives, and intended audience. Not strictly a transgressive influence, women's humor is seen as both a social corrective and a reinforcement of established ideologies. Humor has become an epistemology, an "attitude" or slant on one's relation to society. Zwagerman seeks to broaden the scope of performativity theory beyond the logical pragmatism of deconstruction and looks to the use of humor in literature as a deliberate stylization of experiences found in real-world social structures, and as a tool for change.
Mark Twain by
Mark Twain, who was often photographed with a cigar, once remarked that he came into the world looking for a light. In this new biography, published on the centennial of the writer's death, Jerome Loving focuses on Mark Twain, humorist and quipster, and sheds new light on the wit, pathos, and tragedy of the author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In brisk and compelling fashion, Loving follows Twain from Hannibal to Hawaii to the Holy Land, showing how the southerner transformed himself into a westerner and finally a New Englander. This re-examination of Twain's life is informed by newly discovered archival materials that provide the most complex view of the man and writer to date.
Mark Twain at Home by
Twain scholar Michael J. Kiskis opens this fascinating new exploration of Twain with the observation that most readers have no idea that Samuel Clemens was the father of four and that he lived through the deaths of three of his children as well as his wife. In Mark Twain at Home: How Family Shaped Twain's Fiction, Kiskis persuasively argues that not only was Mark Twain not, as many believe, "antidomestic," but rather that home and family were the muse and core message of his writing. Mark Twain was the child of a loveless marriage and a homelife over which hovered the constant specter of violence. Informed by his difficult childhood, orthodox readings of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn frame these canonical literary figures as nostalgic--autobiographical fables of heroic individualists slipping the bonds of domestic life. Kiskis, however, presents a wealth of biographical details about Samuel Clemens and his family that reinterpret Twain's work as a robust affirmation of domestic spheres of life. Among Kiskis's themes are that, as the nineteenth century witnessed high rates of orphanhood and childhood mortality, Clemens's work often depicted unmoored children seeking not escape from home but rather seeking the redemption and safety available only in familial structures. Similarly, Mark Twain at Home demonstrates that, following the birth of his first daughter, Twain began to exhibit in his writing an anxiety with social ills, notably those that affected children. In vigorous and accessible descriptions of Twain's life as it became reflected in his prose, Kiskis offers a compelling and fresh understanding of this work of this iconic American author.
Heretical Fictions by
Challenging the prevailing belief that Mark Twain s position on religion hovered somewhere between skepticism and outright heresy, Lawrence Berkove and Joseph Csicsila marshal biographical details of Twain s life alongside close readings of his work to explore the religious faith of America s most beloved writer and humorist. They conclude not only that religion was an important factor in Twain s life but also that the popular conception of Twain as agnostic, atheist, or apostate is simply wrong. "Heretical Fictions" is the first full-length study to assess the importance of Twain s heretical Calvinism as the foundation of his major works, bringing to light important thematic ties that connect the author s early work to his high period and from there to his late work. Berkove and Csicsila set forth the main elements of Twain s countertheological interpretation of Calvinism and analyze in detail the way it shapes five of his major books "Roughing It," " The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," " Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," " A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court," and" No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger" as well as some of his major short stories. The result is a ground-breaking and unconventional portrait of a seminal figure in American letters.
Kurt Vonnegut by
With a career spanning 50 years, Kurt Vonnegut is one of the most prolific and popular American writers of the 20th century. Though his works have often met with mixed reviews, and have been difficult to categorize, his status of cultural icon and one of the most important contemporary novelists is well established. This critical companion, perfect for students, skillfully guides readers through seven of Vonnegut's most important novels including Player Piano (1952), Mother Night (1961), Cat's Cradle (1963), and Slaughterhouse Five (1969). A full chapter is devoted to each work, with clear analysis of plot, character development, thematic concerns, symbolism, and a close critical reading. A chapter on the life of Kurt Vonnegut gives an up-to-date biography, with interesting details relating the facts of his life to his writings. The Literary Contexts section, devoted to examining issues of genre, influences and themes in Vonnegut's writing, adds to a fuller understanding of the man and his literary works. This exceptionally well-written Critical Companion will help students and interested readers appreciate Vonnegut's most important and popular novels. Close critical readings offer feminist, Marxist, and new historicist perspectives on these works. A bibliography helps students undertaking research identify additional sources for biographical and critical information, and provides reviews and a comprehensive list of Vonnegut's publications to date.
Contemporary American Trauma Narratives by 
