Blake Nevius – författare

From the preeminent writer of Taiwanese nativist fiction and the leading translator of Chinese literature come these poignant accounts of everyday life in rural and small-town Taiwan. Huang is frequently cited as one of the most original and gifted storytellers in the Chinese language, and these selections reveal his genius. In "The Two Sign Painters," TV reporters ambush two young workers from the country taking a break atop a twenty-four-story building. "His Son's Big Doll" introduces the tortured soul inside a walking advertisement, and in "Xiaoqi's Cap" a dissatisfied pressure-cooker salesman is fascinated by a young schoolgirl.Huang's characters -- generally the uneducated and disadvantaged who must cope with assaults on their traditionalism, hostility from their urban brethren and, of course, the debilitating effects of poverty -- come to life in all their human uniqueness, free from idealization.

Blake Nevius’s close analysis and appraisal of Edith Wharton’s novels and stories reveals the modernity of her fiction and shows why she should have a permanent claim on our attention. Wharton is the only American novelist who has dealt successfully and at length with the remains of traditional New York society, which barely survived the beginning of the twentieth century. She illuminated, as no other novelist of her generation was able to do, a major aspect of U.S. social history through the dramatic conflict between the ideals of the old mercantile and the new industrial societies. Nevius also argues that Wharton, next to Henry James, is our most successful novelist of manners and, along with him, helped preserve the artistic dignity of the novel This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1953.

Cooper's Landscapes: An Essay on the Picturesque Vision delves into the vivid and enduring landscapes of James Fenimore Cooper's works, exploring how his descriptive artistry shaped the American literary imagination. This essay examines Cooper's unique ability to translate the grandeur of early 19th-century America into powerful visual panoramas that resonate with readers long after the characters and plots fade. Drawing on insights from European aesthetic traditions and the picturesque conventions, the book highlights how Cooper's narrative settings were inspired by both his American roots and his transformative years abroad. This perspective not only contextualizes his work within the broader scope of art and landscape painting but also underscores Cooper's innovative approach to crafting scenes that intertwine with the thematic elements of his storytelling.The book also offers a fresh critique of Cooper’s aesthetic education, focusing on his mastery of landscape organization, the influence of his European experiences, and his application of landscape gardening principles in fiction. From early romances like The Last of the Mohicans to the nuanced complexities of later works such as Wyandotte, the essay reveals how Cooper’s visual imagination evolved to serve his narrative ambitions. By connecting Cooper’s artistry to the broader Romantic movement and theories of visual perception, this study illuminates the profound interplay between literature and the sister arts, offering a rich framework for appreciating Cooper’s enduring contributions to American cultural and literary history.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.

Cooper's Landscapes: An Essay on the Picturesque Vision delves into the vivid and enduring landscapes of James Fenimore Cooper's works, exploring how his descriptive artistry shaped the American literary imagination. This essay examines Cooper's unique ability to translate the grandeur of early 19th-century America into powerful visual panoramas that resonate with readers long after the characters and plots fade. Drawing on insights from European aesthetic traditions and the picturesque conventions, the book highlights how Cooper's narrative settings were inspired by both his American roots and his transformative years abroad. This perspective not only contextualizes his work within the broader scope of art and landscape painting but also underscores Cooper's innovative approach to crafting scenes that intertwine with the thematic elements of his storytelling. The book also offers a fresh critique of Cooper’s aesthetic education, focusing on his mastery of landscape organization, the influence of his European experiences, and his application of landscape gardening principles in fiction. From early romances like The Last of the Mohicans to the nuanced complexities of later works such as Wyandotte, the essay reveals how Cooper’s visual imagination evolved to serve his narrative ambitions. By connecting Cooper’s artistry to the broader Romantic movement and theories of visual perception, this study illuminates the profound interplay between literature and the sister arts, offering a rich framework for appreciating Cooper’s enduring contributions to American cultural and literary history. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.

Blake Nevius’s Robert Herrick: The Development of a Novelist offers a rigorously contextualized reassessment of an American realist whose reputation straddles the interregnum between Howells and the moderns. Eschewing formal biography, Nevius reconstructs Herrick’s artistic formation through a dense weave of memoir variants, archival traces (municipal and university records, correspondence), and close readings that track the transmutation of lived incident into narrative design. The study’s throughline is methodological: Nevius demonstrates how Herrick’s compulsive recourse to autobiographical matter—family psychodramas, Chicago’s academic and commercial milieus, and a gallery of recognizably roman-à-clef portraits—both powered and constrained his fiction. Chapters align compositional problems with career stages, returning to the acknowledged masterworks—*The Common Lot* (1904), *The Memoirs of an American Citizen* (1905), and *Together* (1908)—to show how Herrick’s documentary impulse, liberal reform commitments, and formal pragmatics coalesced into an unusually capacious social canvas.For scholars of American realism, Nevius’s contribution is twofold: a clarified textual genealogy and a reframed critical history. He reconstructs the early reception (from Howells’s championship to the 1910 collapse of *A Life for a Life* and the long eclipse) and parses the interwar reassessments (Van Doren, Hicks, Arvin, Kazin), situating Herrick as a diagnostician of upper–middle-class ethos and Progressive-era institutions rather than a mere period “documentarian.” The book is equally attentive to ethics and craft: it probes Herrick’s habitual redeployment of private lives, the aesthetic liabilities of “fact-tyranny,” and the oscillation between sociological breadth and imaginative invention across the late autobiographical novels (*Waste*, *Chimes*, *The End of Desire*) and the Virgin Islands turn. Nevius thus restores Herrick to the cultural and institutional center of early twentieth-century U.S. fiction, mapping the feedback loop between personality, professional life, and novelistic practice with a precision that invites renewed archival, editorial, and theoretical work.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1962.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1962.

Blake Nevius’s Robert Herrick: The Development of a Novelist offers a rigorously contextualized reassessment of an American realist whose reputation straddles the interregnum between Howells and the moderns. Eschewing formal biography, Nevius reconstructs Herrick’s artistic formation through a dense weave of memoir variants, archival traces (municipal and university records, correspondence), and close readings that track the transmutation of lived incident into narrative design. The study’s throughline is methodological: Nevius demonstrates how Herrick’s compulsive recourse to autobiographical matter—family psychodramas, Chicago’s academic and commercial milieus, and a gallery of recognizably roman-à-clef portraits—both powered and constrained his fiction. Chapters align compositional problems with career stages, returning to the acknowledged masterworks—*The Common Lot* (1904), *The Memoirs of an American Citizen* (1905), and *Together* (1908)—to show how Herrick’s documentary impulse, liberal reform commitments, and formal pragmatics coalesced into an unusually capacious social canvas.For scholars of American realism, Nevius’s contribution is twofold: a clarified textual genealogy and a reframed critical history. He reconstructs the early reception (from Howells’s championship to the 1910 collapse of *A Life for a Life* and the long eclipse) and parses the interwar reassessments (Van Doren, Hicks, Arvin, Kazin), situating Herrick as a diagnostician of upper–middle-class ethos and Progressive-era institutions rather than a mere period “documentarian.” The book is equally attentive to ethics and craft: it probes Herrick’s habitual redeployment of private lives, the aesthetic liabilities of “fact-tyranny,” and the oscillation between sociological breadth and imaginative invention across the late autobiographical novels (*Waste*, *Chimes*, *The End of Desire*) and the Virgin Islands turn. Nevius thus restores Herrick to the cultural and institutional center of early twentieth-century U.S. fiction, mapping the feedback loop between personality, professional life, and novelistic practice with a precision that invites renewed archival, editorial, and theoretical work.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1962.

Cooper's Landscapes: An Essay on the Picturesque Vision delves into the vivid and enduring landscapes of James Fenimore Cooper's works, exploring how his descriptive artistry shaped the American literary imagination. This essay examines Cooper's unique ability to translate the grandeur of early 19th-century America into powerful visual panoramas that resonate with readers long after the characters and plots fade. Drawing on insights from European aesthetic traditions and the picturesque conventions, the book highlights how Cooper's narrative settings were inspired by both his American roots and his transformative years abroad. This perspective not only contextualizes his work within the broader scope of art and landscape painting but also underscores Cooper's innovative approach to crafting scenes that intertwine with the thematic elements of his storytelling.The book also offers a fresh critique of Cooper’s aesthetic education, focusing on his mastery of landscape organization, the influence of his European experiences, and his application of landscape gardening principles in fiction. From early romances like The Last of the Mohicans to the nuanced complexities of later works such as Wyandotte, the essay reveals how Cooper’s visual imagination evolved to serve his narrative ambitions. By connecting Cooper’s artistry to the broader Romantic movement and theories of visual perception, this study illuminates the profound interplay between literature and the sister arts, offering a rich framework for appreciating Cooper’s enduring contributions to American cultural and literary history.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.

Blake Nevius’s close analysis and appraisal of Edith Wharton’s novels and stories reveals the modernity of her fiction and shows why she should have a permanent claim on our attention. Wharton is the only American novelist who has dealt successfully and at length with the remains of traditional New York society, which barely survived the beginning of the twentieth century. She illuminated, as no other novelist of her generation was able to do, a major aspect of U.S. social history through the dramatic conflict between the ideals of the old mercantile and the new industrial societies. Nevius also argues that Wharton, next to Henry James, is our most successful novelist of manners and, along with him, helped preserve the artistic dignity of the novel This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1953.

Blake Nevius’s close analysis and appraisal of Edith Wharton’s novels and stories reveals the modernity of her fiction and shows why she should have a permanent claim on our attention. Wharton is the only American novelist who has dealt successfully and at length with the remains of traditional New York society, which barely survived the beginning of the twentieth century. She illuminated, as no other novelist of her generation was able to do, a major aspect of U.S. social history through the dramatic conflict between the ideals of the old mercantile and the new industrial societies. Nevius also argues that Wharton, next to Henry James, is our most successful novelist of manners and, along with him, helped preserve the artistic dignity of the novel This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1953.

When Cooper''s most memorable hero, Leatherstocking, started an American tradition by setting off into the sunset in The Pioneers, one early reader said of his departure, "I longed to go with him." American readers couldn''t get enough of the Leatherstocking saga (collected in two Library of America volumes) and, fourteen years after he portrayed the death of Natty Bumppo in The Prairie, Cooper brought him back in The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea (1841). During the Seven Years War, just after the events narrated in The Last of the Mohicans, Natty brings the daughter of a British sergeant to her father''s station on the Great Lakes, where the French and their Indian allies are plotting a treacherous ambush. Here, for the first time, he falls in love with a woman, before Cooper manages bring off Leatherstocking''s most poignant, and perhaps his most revealing, escape.The Deerslayer (1842) brings the saga full circle and follows the young Natty on his first warpath. Instinctively gifted in the arts of the forest, pious in his respect for the unspoiled wilderness on which he loves to gaze, honorable to friend and foe alike, stoic under torture, and cool under fire, the young Leatherstocking emerges as Cooper''s noblest figure of the American frontier. Enacting a rite of passage both for its hero and for the culture he comes to represent, this last book in the series glows with a timelessness that readers everywhere will find enchanting.From the Hardcover edition.

The five novels in The Leatherstocking Tales (collected in two Library of America volumes), Cooper''s great saga of the American wilderness, form a pageant of the American frontier. Cooper''s hero, Natty Bumppo, is forced ever farther into the heart of the continent by the advance of civilization that he inadvertently serves as advance scout, missionary, and critic. Leatherstocking first appears in The Pioneers (1823), as an aged hunter living on the fringe of settlement near Templeton (Cooperstown), New York, at the end of the eighteenth century. There he becomes caught in the struggles of party, family, and class to control the changing American land and to determine what sort of civilization will replace the rapidly vanishing wilderness. When Natty Bumppo started an American tradition by setting off into the sunset at the novel''s close, one early reader said, "I longed to go with him."The Last of the Mohicans (1826) is a pure unabashed narrative of adventure. It looks back to the earlier time of the French and Indian Wars, when Natty and his two companions, Chingachgook and Uncas, survivors of a once-proud Indian nation, attempt a daring rescue and seek to forestall the plan of the French to unleash their Mingo allies on a wave of terror through the English settlements.The Prairie (1827) takes up Natty in his eighties, driven by the continuous march of civilization to his last refuge on the Great Plains across the Mississippi. On this vast and barren stage, the Sioux and Pawnee, the outlaw clan of Ishmael Bush, and members of the Lewis and Clark expedition enact a romantic drama of intrigue, pursuit, and biblical justice that reflects Cooper''s historical dialectic of culture and nature, of the American nation and the American continent.From the Hardcover edition.