Studies in Major Literary Authors
About the Book Series
Studies in Major Literary Authors features outstanding scholarship on celebrated and neglected authors of both canonical and lesser-known texts.
Narrative Conventions and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison
1st Edition
By Jennifer Lee Jordan Heinert
January 06, 2011
This study analyzes the relationship between race and genre in four of Toni Morrison’s novels: The Bluest Eye, Tar Baby, Jazz, and Beloved. Heinert argues how Morrison’s novels revise conventional generic forms such as bildungsroman, folktales, slave narratives, and the formal realism of the ...
Paul Auster's Postmodernity
1st Edition
By Brendan Martin
December 13, 2010
This book focuses upon the literary and autobiographical writings of American novelist Paul Auster, investigating his literary postmodernity in relation to a full range of his writings. Martin addresses Auster’s evocation of a range of postmodern notions, such as the duplicitous art of ...
Philip K. Dick: Canonical Writer of the Digital Age
1st Edition
By Lejla Kucukalic
November 10, 2010
Kucukalic looks beyond the received criticism and stereotypes attached to Philip K. Dick and his work and shows, using a wealth of primary documents including previously unpublished letters and interviews, that Philip K. Dick is a serious and relevant philosophical and cultural ...
Everybody's America: Thomas Pynchon, Race, and the Cultures of Postmodernism
1st Edition
By David Witzling
July 21, 2010
Everybody’s America reassesses Pynchon’s literary career in order to explain the central role played by the racialization of American culture in the postmodernist deconstruction of subjectivity and literary authority and in the crisis in white liberal culture. It charts the evolution of both these ...
Colonialism and the Modernist Moment in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys
1st Edition
By Carol Dell'Amico
February 02, 2010
Colonialism and the Modernist Moment in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys explores the postcolonial significance of Rhys’s modernist period work, which depicts an urban scene more varied than that found in other canonical representations of the period. Arguing against the view that Rhys comes into her ...
Edith Wharton's Evolutionary Conception: Darwinian Allegory in the Major Novels
1st Edition
By Paul J. Ohler
January 26, 2010
Edith Wharton's "Evolutionary Conception" investigates Edith Wharton's engagement with evolutionary theory in The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence. The book also examines The Descent of Man, The Fruit of the Tree, Twilight Sleep, and The Children to show that ...
The Carver Chronotope: Contextualizing Raymond Carver
1st Edition
By G.P. Lainsbury
December 24, 2009
Raymond Carver's fiction is widely known for its careful documentation of lower-middle-class North America in the 1970s and 80s. Building upon the realist understanding of Carver's work, Raymond Carver's Chronotope uses a central concept of Bakhtin's novelistics to formulate a new context for ...
Homosexuality in the Life and Work of Joseph Conrad: Love Between the Lines
1st Edition
By Richard J. Ruppel
November 23, 2009
This book analyzes the representations of homosexuality in Conrad’s fiction, beginning with Conrad’s life and letters to show that Conrad himself was, at least imaginatively, bisexual. Conrad’s recurrent bouts of neurasthenia, his difficult courtships, late marriage, and frequent expressions of ...
Wallace Stevens and the Realities of Poetic Language
1st Edition
By Stefan Holander
November 16, 2009
This study examines Wallace Stevens' ideas and practice of poetic language with a focus on the 1930s, an era in which Stevens persistently thematized a keenly felt pressure for the possible social involvement and political utility of poetic language. The argument suggests how mutually implicated ...
Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism
1st Edition
By John Cant
September 17, 2009
This overview of McCarthy’s published work to date, including: the short stories he published as a student, his novels, stage play and TV film script, locates him as a icocolastic writer, engaged in deconstructing America’s vision of itself as a nation with an exceptionalist role in the world. ...
Our Scene is London: Ben Jonson's City and the Space of the Author
1st Edition
By James D. Mardock
September 17, 2009
In this thought-provoking study Mardock looks at Ben Jonson's epigrams, prose, and verse satire in order to focus on Jonson's theatrical appropriations of London space both in and out of the playhouse. Through this critical analysis, the author argues that the strategies of...
Writing Out of All the Camps: J.M. Coetzee's Narratives of Displacement
1st Edition
By Laura Wright
July 01, 2009
Writing "Out of all the Camps": J. M. Coetzee's Narratives of Displacement is an interdisciplinary examination--combining ethical, postcolonial, performance, gender-based, and environmental theory--of the ways that 2003 Nobel Prize-winning South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, primarily through his...