Stephen Fender – författare

A wonderful new collection of tales exploring Henry James's favourite 'international theme': the experiences of Americans in Europe, and the meeting of the old world and new. Daisy Miller is one of Henry James's great heroines - a young, independent American travelling in Europe, whose flouting of social conventions has the potential to lead to disaster. Her story is here accompanied by six more set among English castles, Swiss hotels and French ports, and all riffing on a classic Jamesian theme: the clash between the old world and new, Europe and America.The tales included in this volume are 'Travelling Companions', 'Madame de Mauves', 'Four Meetings', 'Daisy Miller', 'An International Episode', 'Europe' and 'Fordham Castle', and the collection has been edited by renowned scholar of Anglo-American literature, Stephen Fender, under the general editorship of Philip Horne. This is one of three new volumes of James's greatest tales in Penguin Classics, and is accompanied by The Aspern Papers and Other Tales and The Turn of the Screw and Other Tales (forthcoming).

Working through close rhetorical analysis of everything from fiction and journalism to documents and documentaries, this book looks at how popular memory favors the country Depression over the economic crisis in the nation’s cities and factories. Over eighty years after it happened, the Depression still lives on in iconic images of country poor whites – in the novels of John Steinbeck, the photographs of Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein, the documentary films of Pare Lorenz and the thousands of share-croppers’ life histories as taken down by the workers of the Federal Writers’ Project. Like the politicians and bureaucrats who accomplished the New Deal’s radical reforms in banking, social security and labor union law, the artists, novelists and other writers who supported or even worked for the New Deal were idealists, well to the left of center in their politics. Yet when it came to hard times on the American farm, something turned them into unwitting reactionaries. Though they brought these broken lives of the country poor to the notice and sympathy of the public, they also worked unconsciously to undermine their condition. How and why? Fender shows how the answer lies in clues overlooked until now, hidden in their writing -- their journalism and novels, the "life histories" they ghost wrote for their poor white clients, the bureaucratic communications through which they administered these cultural programs, even in the documentary photographs and movies, with their insistent captions and voice-overs. This book is a study of literary examples from in and around the country Depression, and the myths on which they drew.

This book focuses on the experience of the Californian Gold Rush of 1849-1850, not in terms of what happened (a subject much covered by historians) but in terms of how people of various levels of sophistication wrote about it. Drawing on a variety of sources - diaries, journals, letters, and contemporary journalism - Dr Fender explores how both amateur and professional writers attempted to come to terms with the physical wilderness of the transcontinental landscape and the social wilderness of early California. Dr Fender has produced an intriguing and highly readable book, which should prove fascinating not only to a wide range of students in the field of American studies but also to non-specialists who are interested in nineteenth-century American literary and cultural history.

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. This is the first full critical edition of James's first major novel after his unhappy venture into commercial theatre. The Spoils of Poynton marks a shift towards the representation of complex psychological states characteristic of his later fiction, telling a dramatic story about the fate of the beautiful artefacts lovingly collected by the widow Adela Gereth and her late husband. Who do they, should they, belong to? The novel describes with extraordinary delicacy an intense family feud arising from the competing claims of those close to Mrs Gereth, and the ordeal endured by the young and intelligent Fleda Vetch as she tries to resolve it. This edition features a substantial introduction, explanatory notes, textual variants, bibliography and appendices.

Working through close rhetorical analysis of everything from fiction and journalism to documents and documentaries, this book looks at how popular memory favors the country Depression over the economic crisis in the nation’s cities and factories. Over eighty years after it happened, the Depression still lives on in iconic images of country poor whites – in the novels of John Steinbeck, the photographs of Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein, the documentary films of Pare Lorenz and the thousands of share-croppers’ life histories as taken down by the workers of the Federal Writers’ Project. Like the politicians and bureaucrats who accomplished the New Deal’s radical reforms in banking, social security and labor union law, the artists, novelists and other writers who supported or even worked for the New Deal were idealists, well to the left of center in their politics. Yet when it came to hard times on the American farm, something turned them into unwitting reactionaries. Though they brought these broken lives of the country poor to the notice and sympathy of the public, they also worked unconsciously to undermine their condition. How and why? Fender shows how the answer lies in clues overlooked until now, hidden in their writing -- their journalism and novels, the "life histories" they ghost wrote for their poor white clients, the bureaucratic communications through which they administered these cultural programs, even in the documentary photographs and movies, with their insistent captions and voice-overs. This book is a study of literary examples from in and around the country Depression, and the myths on which they drew.

First published between 1982 and 1983, this series examines the peculiarly American cultural context out of which the nation’s literature has developed. Covering the years from 1620 to 1830, this first volume of American Literature in Context examines a range of texts from the writings of the Puritan settlers through the declaration of Independence to the novels of Fenimore Cooper. In doing so, it shows how early Americans thought about their growing nation, their arguments for immigration, for political and cultural independence, and the doubts they experienced in this ambitious project. This book will be of interest to those studying American literature and American studies.

First published between 1982 and 1983, this series examines the peculiarly American cultural context out of which the nation’s literature has developed. Covering the years from 1620 to 1830, this first volume of American Literature in Context examines a range of texts from the writings of the Puritan settlers through the declaration of Independence to the novels of Fenimore Cooper. In doing so, it shows how early Americans thought about their growing nation, their arguments for immigration, for political and cultural independence, and the doubts they experienced in this ambitious project. This book will be of interest to those studying American literature and American studies.

Everyone knows the ‘American dream’: that America is the land of free enterprise, offering men and women without inherited advantages the chance to get ahead through hard work and self-reliance. Yet in The Great American Speech Stephen Fender offers an alternative vision, one enshrined in the country’s most memorable speeches, which have become monuments in its national memory and literally in the nation’s capital, carved in memorial stone. This other American dream is not about competition or getting ahead, but instead echoes the country’s founding documents, arguing for equality and cooperation.Beginning with two contrasting visions set out by early settlers in the New World, Fender goes on to explore how this other dream has been kept alive in public speeches to live audiences, from inaugural addresses by early presidents such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, through Abraham Lincoln’s arguments both logical and passionate for the Union, and on to mass appeals for wider understanding by John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and suggests that these two opposing visions of the country’s moral purpose are fundamentally two free-standing visions of national identity.He considers the ‘Great American Speech’ in popular culture, illustrating how it pops up not just in cinema’s courtrooms, where it might be expected, but in adventure films, thrillers and political melodramas, where in the midst of conflict someone often speaks up for the relative normality of a more egalitarian, sharing society. The Great American Speech is a contemplative, fascinating look at a hidden strand of American national identity.