General

American Unexceptionalism examines a constellation of post-9/11 novels that revolve around white middle-class male suburbanites, thus following a tradition established by writers such as John Updike and John Cheever. Focusing closely on recent works by...

A century after Samuel Clemens's death, Mark Twain thrives - his recently released autobiography topped bestseller lists. One way fans still celebrate the first true American writer and his work is by visiting any number of Mark Twain destinations. They...

Winner of the 2010 Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form, sponsored by the Media Ecology Association. An interdisciplinary study of the condition of narrative fiction in the age of its supposed obsolescence...

When a self-proclaimed 'lazy scholar' embarks on a trip through his life's influences - as diverse as girl-group doo-wop, Yeats, and Van Gogh - readers are in for an illuminating ride. This collection of essays from cultural critic Di Piero veers from...

The ghost as a literary figure has been interpreted in a variety of ways: spiritually, psychoanalytically, sociologically, or allegorically. Following these approaches, Janna Odabas understands ghosts in Asian American literature as self-reflexive...

Daniel Cross Turner has made a key contribution to the critical study and appreciation of the diverse field of contemporary Southern poetics. Southern Crossings"" crosses a gulf in contemporary poetry criticism while using the idea- or...

Androgynous Democracy examines how the notions of gender equality propounded by transcendentalists and other nineteenth-century writers were further developed and complicated by the rise of literary modernism. Aaron Shaheen specifically investigates the...

In his book ""Nation and Region in Modern American and European Fiction"", Thomas O. Beebee analyzes fictional texts as a ""discursive territoriality"" that shape readers' notions of (and ambivalence about)...

Fitzgerald's Mentors is a fresh and compelling study of F. Scott Fitzgerald's intellectual friendship with Edmund Wilson, H. L. Mencken, and Gerald Murphy. Fitzgerald was shaped through his engagements with key literary and artistic figures in the 1920s...

This collection takes as its point of departure the proposition that one can, in fact, tell a book by its cover. The contributors examine the ways in which the material qualities of books―including typography, paper, bindings, layout , and promotional...

To 21st century readers, 19th century depictions of death look macabre if not maudlin - the mourning portraits and quilts, the postmortem daguerreotypes, and the memorial jewelry now hopelessly, if not morbidly, distressing. Yet this sentimental culture...

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book, wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden. Today that book continues to provoke, inspire, and change lives all over the world, and each rereading is fresh and challenging. Yet as...

Since the release of his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, in 1965, Cormac McCarthy's characters, intricate plots, and sometimes forbidding settings have captivated the attention of countless readers while exploring deep philosophical problems, including...

The years between World War I and World War II are commonly seen as the period when international modernism took hold in American art. C. Barry Chabot, however, argues against the assumption that American modernist writers were preoccupied by artistic...

Film critic David Sterritt presents an interdisciplinary exploration of the Beat Generation, its intersections with mainstream and experimental film, and the interactions of all of these with American society and the culture of the 1950s. Sterritt...

Tim Hunt's The Textuality of Soulwork: Jack Kerouac's Quest for Spontaneous Prose examines Kerouac's work from a new critical perspective with a focus on the author's unique methods of creating and working with text. Additionally, The Textuality of...

This interdisciplinary study examines the still vivid phenomenon of the most controversial psychiatric diagnosis in the United States: multiple personality disorder, now called dissociative identity disorder. This syndrome comprehends the occurrence of...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781625344847Author Amy Hildreth ChenFormat HardbackPage Count 192Imprint University of Massachusetts PressPublisher University of Massachusetts Press

After a chance meeting with a shaman in Colombia, Ilan Stavans, the highly regarded literary scholar, found himself in the Amazon rainforest. He had reluctantly agreed to participate in a religious ceremony that involved taking the hallucinogen ayahuasca...

An exploration of America's battle with the bottle through an analysis of literature on temperance. The ten essays in this book include topics ranging from the cultural role of the tavern in the 18th century, to the emergence of the disease paradigm of...

The Myth of Ephraim Tutt explores the true and previously untold story behind one of the most elaborate literary hoaxes in American history. Arthur Train was a Harvard-educated and well-respected attorney. He was also a best-selling author. Train's...

Artistic Liberties is a landmark study of the illustrations that originally accompanied now-classic works of American literary realism and the ways editors, authors, and illustrators vied for authority over the publications. Though today, we commonly...

Depicted in popular films, television series, novels, poems, and countless media reports, Sylvia Plath's women readers have become nearly as legendary as Plath herself, in large part because the depictions are seldom kind. If one is to believe the...

An old Indian woman comforts two young white children she finds lost in the woods and lovingly carries them back to their eager parents. A frontiersman sheds tears over the grave of a Mohican youth, holding hands with the mourning father.According to...

In the late 1930s, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, and Ernest Hemingway wrote novels that won critical acclaim and popular success: The Grapes of Wrath, Native Son, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. All three writers were involved with the Left at the time,...

From Herman Melville's claim that "failure is the true test of greatness" to Henry Adams's self-identification with the "mortifying failure in [his] long education" and William Faulkner's eagerness to be judged by his "splendid...

Literary studies in the postwar era have consistently barred attributing specific intentions to authors based on textual evidence or ascribing textual presences to the authors themselves. Obscure Invitations argues that this taboo has blinded us to...

This book discusses how Northern writers came to grips with the mixed legacy of the Civil War.The memory of the American Civil War took many forms over the decades after the conflict ended: personal, social, religious, and political. It was also...

Why are twentieth-century novelists from former British colonies in the Americas preoccupied with British Romantic poetry? In Romantic Revisions, Lauren Rule Maxwell examines five novels-Kincaid's Lucy, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, McCarthy's Blood...

Focusing on Mark Twain's fiction, this study defines and demonstrates Twain's poetics and reveals why his work was humorous. It argues that his strength lay not in comedy or satire, but instead in his use of the sick joke. The book also draws parallels...

The United States set about defining and reforming its criminal justice institutions during the antebellum years, just as an innovative, expanding print culture afforded authors and publishers unprecedented opportunities to reflect on these important...

In this unique and engaging collection, twelve essays celebrate the legacy of one of America's most important playwrights and investigate Williams's enduring effect on America's cultural, theatrical, and literary heritage.  Like Faulkner before him,...

Harold K. Bush’s Continuing Bonds with the Dead examines the profound transfiguration that the death of a child wrought on the literary work of nineteenth-century American writers. Taking as his subjects Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, William...

America’s literature is notably marked by a preoccupation with the spiritual quest. Questing heroes from Huck Finn to Nick Adams have undertaken solitary journeys that pull them away from family and society and into a transformative wilderness that...

In this multidisciplinary study, Amy Koritz examines the drama, dance, and literature of the 1920s, focusing on how artists used these different media to engage three major concurrent shifts in economic and social organization: the emergence of...

    Before publishing Dreiser's European travel book in 1913, the Century Company editors had heavily excised autobiographical reminiscences, philosophical speculations, revealing portraits of prominent figures, Dreiser's relationships with women, and...

Elisa Tamarkin charts the Anglophilia that emerged after the American Revolution and remains in the character of U.S. society and class, the style of academic life, and the idea of American intellectualism. But, as she shows, this Anglophilia was more...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780939510979Author Robert A RichterFormat HardbackPage Count 160Imprint Mystic Seaport MuseumPublisher Mystic Seaport MuseumWeight(grams) 553g

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780814212318Author Robert McGillFormat HardbackPage Count 208Imprint Ohio State University PressPublisher Ohio State University PressWeight(grams) 544g

When Sacvan Bercovitch's The American Jeremiad first appeared in 1978, it was hailed as a landmark study of dissent and cultural formation in America, from the Puritans' writings through the major literary works of the antebellum era. For this...