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.
Creating Yoknapatawpha: Readers and Writers in Faulkner's Fiction
1st Edition
By Owen Robinson
June 16, 2009
Creating Yoknapatawpha is a study of the crucial interplay of reading and writing processes involved in constructing the textual environment of William Faulkner’s work, and the nature and significance of the world created by these many forces. Yoknapatawpha County, the author contends, is the ...
Edith Wharton as Spatial Activist and Analyst
1st Edition
By Reneé Somers
June 16, 2009
Because she devoted much of her life to exploring the relationships that exist between people and their built environment, Edith Wharton developed a set of philosophies that she expressed in many arenas, including interior design, architecture, and landscaping. Her theories of space were practiced ...
Milton's Uncertain Eden: Understanding Place in Paradise Lost
1st Edition
By Andrew Mattison
June 16, 2009
This study describes a variety of ways of thinking about place in the Renaissance and in Paradise Lost. Despite coming from different perspectives, they have in common the idea that the difficulty of the relationship of reciprocity that poetic subjects often expect from their environment ...
Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde
1st Edition
By Paul Fortunato
June 16, 2009
Oscar Wilde was a consumer modernist. His modernist aesthetics drove him into the heart of the mass culture industries of 1890s London, particularly the journalism and popular theatre industries. Wilde was extremely active in these industries: as a journalist at the Pall Mall Gazette; as magazine...
No Place for Home: Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy
1st Edition
By Jay Ellis
June 16, 2009
This book was written to venture beyond interpretations of Cormac McCarthy's characters as simple, antinomian, and non-psychological; and of his landscapes as unrelated to the violent arcs of often orphaned and always emotionally isolated and socially detached characters. As McCarthy usually ...
Pynchon and History: Metahistorical Rhetoric and Postmodern Narrative Form in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon
1st Edition
By Shawn Smith
June 16, 2009
First Published in 2005. While many previous books on Pynchon allude to his fictional engagement with historical events and figures, this book explores Pynchon as a historical novelist and, by extension, historical thinker. The book interprets Pynchon's four major novels V., Gravity's Rainbow, ...
Sports, Narrative, and Nation in the Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald
1st Edition
By Jarom McDonald
June 16, 2009
This study examines the ways that F. Scott Fitzgerald portrayed organized spectator sports as working to help structure ideologies of class, community, and nationhood. Situating the study in the landscape of late nineteenth/early twentieth-century American sport culture, Chapter One shows how ...
Technique and Sensibility in the Fiction and Poetry of Raymond Carver
1st Edition
By Arthur F. Bethea
June 16, 2009
Emphasizing important techniques and themes, with due consideration of germane theoretical perspectives and relevant biographical materials, this study offers the most comprehensive, sophisticated examination of Raymond Carver's fiction and poetry to date. Key arguments include a de-emphasis of ...
The Environmental Unconscious in the Fiction of Don DeLillo
1st Edition
By Elise Martucci
June 16, 2009
This book presents an ecocritical reading of DeLillo’s novels in an attempt to mediate between the seemingly incompatible influences of postmodernism and environmentalism. Martucci argues that although DeLillo is responding to and engaging with a postmodern culture of simulacra and simulation,...
Who Reads Ulysses?: The Common Reader and the Rhetoric of the Joyce Wars
1st Edition
By Julie Sloan Brannon
June 16, 2009
Julie Sloan Brannon examines the Joyce Wars as a fascinating nexus of the conflicts between scholars and ordinary readers, and one that illuminates the existence of ulysses -and by extension, Joyce-as an example of Lyotard's differend , an icon that exists simultaneously in two separate yet ...
Elizabeth Stoddard & the Boundaries of Bourgeois Culture
1st Edition
By Lynn Mahoney
December 01, 2003
Elizabeth Stoddard and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Culture traces Stoddard's emergence as a writer in the 1850s, her conflict-ridden relationships with the writers associated with the genteel tradition, and her efforts to negotiate the boundaries of Victorian culture in the United States. While in...