Studies in American Literature and Culture – serie

A fascinating survey of the changing fortunes of Steinbeck's critical reputation.This work by a prominent Steinbeck scholar begins with a study of the novelist's early celebrity in the 1930s and 1940s. Ditsky shows that by the late 1940s there was some falling off in Steinbeck's critical reputation, and yet that is also the period in which the 'first generation' of Steinbeck critics did their first work: seminal commentary by Peter Lisca, Warren French, and Joseph Fontenrose. These critics were unwilling to accept the fact that the proletarian writer of the 1930s was a thing of the past, and that formally he had become much more experimental. In the 1960s, a second generation of critics such as Robert DeMott, Louis Owens, Mimi Gladstein and others, led by the Steinbeck Society's Tetsumaro Hayashi, began to show what the later Steinbeck was about. As the anniversaries of publication of the classic early works approached in the 1970s, there was a quantitative peaking of book-length criticism, accompanied by a spate of conferences in various worldwide venues. A number of anthologies of journal-published articles were published, including one edited by Professor Ditsky. The last two decades have seen new voices emerge, many going beyond close readings to apply contemporary critical methods to a writer increasingly seen as postmodernist.John Ditsky teaches at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. He has published more than 1300 poems and has written four critical works, three of them on Steinbeck.

Employing close reading of a kind usually associated with the study of lyric poetry, this book offers a general framework for reading African-American (and American) literature.This book springs from two premises. The first is that, with a nod toward Marianne Moore, America is - has always been - an imaginary place with real people living in it. The second is that slavery and its legacies explain how and why this is the case. The second premise assumes that slavery - and, after that fell, white supremacy generally - have been necessary adjuncts to American capitalism. Mark Richardson registers these two premises at the level of style and rhetoric - in the texture as much as in the "arguments" of the books he engages. His book is written to appeal to a general reader. It begins with Frederick Douglass, continues with W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Chesnutt, and Richard Wright, and treats works by writers not often discussed in books concerning race in American literature - for example, Stephen Crane and Jack Kerouac. It brings to bear on such books as Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom, Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, and Crane's The Red Badge of Courage a degree and quality of attention one usually associates with the study of lyric poetry. The book offers a general framework within which to read African-American (and American) literature.Mark Richardson is Professor of English at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan. He is co-editor of The Letters of Robert Frost (Harvard University Press) and author of The Ordeal of Robert Frost (University of Illinois Press, 1997).

New, carefully focused essays providing a thorough examination of Hemingway's groundbreaking non-fictional work.Published in 1932, Death in the Afternoon reveals its author at the height of his intellectual and stylistic powers. By that time, Hemingway had already won critical and popular acclaim for his short stories and novels of the late twenties. A mature and self-confident artist, he now risked his career by switching from fiction to nonfiction, from American characters to Spanish bullfighters, from exotic and romantic settings to the tough world of theSpanish bullring, a world that might seem frightening and even repellant to those who do not understand it. Hemingway's nonfiction has been denied the attention that his novels and short stories have enjoyed, a state of affairs this Companion seeks to remedy, breaking new ground by applying theoretical and critical approaches to a work of nonfiction. It does so in original essays that offer a thorough, balanced examination of a complex, boundary-breaking, and hitherto neglected text. The volume is broken into sections dealing with: the composition, reception, and sources of Death in the Afternoon; cultural translation, cultural criticism, semiotics, and paratextual matters; and the issues of art, authorship, audience, and the literary legacy of Death in the Afternoon. The contributors to the volume, four men and seven women, lay to rest the stereotype of Hemingway as a macho writer whom women do not read; and their nationalities (British, Spanish, American, and Israeli) indicate that Death in the Afternoon, even as it focuses on a particular national art, discusses matters of universal concern.Contributors: Miriam B. Mandel, Robert W. Trogdon, Lisa Tyler, Linda Wagner-Martin, Peter Messent, Beatriz Penas Ibáñez, Anthony Brand, Nancy Bredendick, Hilary Justice, Amy Vondrak, and Keneth Kinnamon.MiriamB. Mandel teaches in the English Department of Tel Aviv University.

New essays examining the interface between 18th- and 20th-century culture both in Pynchon's novel and in the historical past.Thomas Pynchon's 1997 novel Mason & Dixon marked a deep shift in Pynchon's career and in American letters in general. All of Pynchon's novels had been socially and politically aware, marked by social criticism and a profound questioning of American values. They have carried the labels of satire and black humor, and "Pynchonesque" has come to be associated with erudition, a playful style, anachronisms and puns -- and an interest in scientific theories, popular culture, paranoia, and the "military-industrial complex." In short, Pynchon's novels were the sine qua non of postmodernism; Mason & Dixon went further, using the same style, wit, and erudition to re-create an 18th century when "America" was being formed as both place and idea. Pynchon's focus on the creation of the Mason-Dixon Line and the governmental and scientific entities responsible for it makes a clearer statement than any of his previous novels about the slavery and imperialism at the heart of the Enlightenment, as he levels a dark and hilarious critique at this America. This volume of new essays studies the interface between 18th- and 20th-century cultureboth in Pynchon's novel and in the historical past. It offers fresh thinking about Pynchon's work, as the contributors take up the linkages between the 18th and 20th centuries in studies that are as concerned with culture as withthe literary text itself. Contributors: Mitchum Huehls, Brian Thill, Colin Clarke, Pedro Garcia-Caro, Dennis Lensing, Justin M. Scott Coe, Ian Copestake, Frank Palmeri.Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds is Professor and Chair of the English Department at SUNY Brockport.

A handbook to Hemingway's famous collection of short stories that emphasizes its status as a modernist masterwork.The volume of collected short stories and vignettes In Our Time was Ernest Hemingway's first commercial publication. Its appearance in 1925 launched the full-fledged literary career of this century's most famous American fiction writer. And while other later works of Hemingway have eclipsed In Our Time's fame, none of Hemingway's subsequent works would again carry the degree of experimentation found in this distinctly modernist masterwork. Modernism and Tradition in Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time: A Guide for Students and Readers is a well-paced, lucidly written handbook intended to guide university students and teaching faculty towards a better understanding of this complex work. It provides a reading of each story and vignette, while simultaneously stressing the status of In Our Time as a discrete volume. Included are discussions of the book's biographical and historical background, and considerations of Hemingway's prose style, theories of writing, formal achievements, his literary mentors and influences, and the relation between In Our Time and his later works.Matthew C. Stewart isAssociate Professor of Humanities and Rhetoric at Boston University.

The poet as an inheritor of an Emersonian tradition, and Paterson as an ethical autobiography in progress.William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) is the most influential figure in the development of American poetry in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. His simple language and focus on the familiar objects and voices of everyday life pulled poetry out of the past and restored its ability to express contemporary experience. Williams believed passionately in poetry's usefulness, abhorring its perception as an esoteric pursuit and insisting on the impact it could have on the life of a reader if only made relevant to his or her experience. Examining the sources of this belief, Ian Copestake breaks new ground by tracing the enduring impact of Williams's youthful experience of Unitarianism on his poetry and arguing that Williams is a poet in an Emersonian tradition.Two chapters focus on Williams's long poem Paterson, arguing that its long gestation -- from 1927 to 1951 -- reflects its role asan ethical autobiography in progress. Copestake investigates sources that point to the ethical heart of Williams's poetry and to his lifelong belief that "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there."Ian D. Copestake is a Lecturer at the University of Bamberg, Germany and editor of the William Carlos Williams Review.

Miller as a writer whose work does something more profound and violent to literary conventions than produce novel effects: it announces the possibility of difference and instability within language itself.Henry Miller is a cult figure in the world of fiction, in part due to having been banned for obscenity for nearly thirty years. Alongside the liberating effect of his explicit treatment of sexuality, however, Miller developed a provocative form of writing that encourages the reader to question language as a stable communicative tool and to consider the act of writing as an ongoing mode of creation, always in motion, perpetually establishing itself and creating meaning through that very motion. Katy Masuga provides a new reading of Miller that is alert to the aggressively and self-consciously writerly form of his work. Critiquing the categorization of Miller into specific literary genres through an examination of the small body of critical texts on his oeuvre, Masuga draws on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of a minor literature, Blanchot's "infinite curve," and Bataille's theory of puerile language, while also considering Miller in relation to other writers, including Proust, Rilke, and William Carlos Williams. She shows how Miller defies conventional modes of writing, subverting language from within.Katy Masuga is Adjunct Professor of British and American literature, cinema, and the arts in the Cultural Studies Department at the University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle.

Frost's breakthrough book of poetry seen anew as an artistic whole and in the context of the poet's career and development.North of Boston, Robert Frost's second book of verse and arguably his greatest, brought him suddenly into national prominence in 1915. Though completed and first published in England in 1914, the book was rooted in the decade, 1900-1910, that Frost spent in Derry, New Hampshire, where he witnessed the decline of its traditional farming culture. In presenting this "drama of disappearance," twelve of the book's fifteen principal poems are literally dramatic, composed mainly of direct dialogue. Among them are three of Frost's most famous lyrics, each featuring a signature task of New England life and underlining the book's tribute to a fading culture. Collectively, the poems bring the diction and tones of a New England vernacular within a traditional metric frame, making "music," as Frost boasted, "from the sound of sense" and poetry of "a language absolutely unliterary." Such adaptations of ordinary language and experience to blank verse drama made Frost a founder of American modernism and North of Boston one of its monuments. Exploring Frost's complex connection to his poetic characters, this study provides new readingsof the individual poems and a new look at North of Boston's development. To a degree no other study has done, it addresses the book's design as an artistic whole while placing it in the context of Frost's unfolding career.David Sanders is Professor Emeritus of English at St. John Fisher College, Rochester, New York.

The first chronological overview of O'Connor criticism from the publication of her first novel, Wise Blood, in 1952 to the present.Flannery O'Connor is one of the most widely read, discussed, and taught of all American authors. She is immensely popular with students, general readers, and literary critics. Her work, often characterized as "Southern Gothic," betrays in its focus on morality her devout Roman Catholic faith even as it displays a wicked sense of humor. She has been the subject of numerous articles and books, and indeed an entire journal devoted to her writings has existedfor decades. There is not, however, any chronological overview of the history of O'Connor criticism. The present volume fills that very conspicuous gap. It is the sort of book that practically every college and university library,as well as many public libraries, will need to own, and it will appeal not only to scholars and students but to non-academic readers of O'Connor, whose numbers are legion. A particular value of the book is that it synthesizes criticism and commentary that is now only available in individual essays that are widely scattered.Robert C. Evans is Professor of English at Auburn University Montgomery. Among his many books is Critical Insights: ShortFiction of Flannery O'Connor (2016).

New scholarly essays providing a multifaceted approach to the role of Africa in Hemingway's life and work.Hemingway's two extended African safaris, the first in the 1930s and the second in the 1950s, gave rise to two of his best-known stories ("The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"), a considerable amount of journalism and correspondence, and two nonfiction books, Green Hills of Africa (1935), about the first safari, and True at First Light (1999; longer version, Under Kilimanjaro 2005), about the second.Africa also figures largely in his important posthumous novel The Garden of Eden (1986). The variety and quantity of this literary output indicate clearly that Africa was a major factor in the creative life of this influential American author. But surprisingly little scholarship has been devoted to the role of Africa in Hemingway's life and work. To start the long-delayed conversation on this topic, this book offers historical, theoretical, biographical, theological, and literary interpretations of Hemingway's African narratives. It also presents a wide-ranging introduction, a detailed chronology of the safaris, a complete bibliography of Hemingway's published and unpublished African works, an up-to-date, annotated review of the scholarship on the African works, and a bibliography of Hemingway's reading on natural history and other topics relevant to Africa and the world of the safari.Contributors: Silvio Calabi, Suzanne del Gizzo, Beatriz Penas Ibáñez, Jeremiah M. Kitunda, Kelli A. Larson, Miriam B. Mandel, Frank Mehring, Philip H. Melling, Erik G. R. Nakjavani, James Plath, and Chikako Tanimoto.Miriam B. Mandel is retired as Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University.

The first study to bring Hemingway, Vonnegut, O'Brien, and 9/11 literature together in order to examine views about war, gender, and domesticity over a hundred-year period.War has often been seen as the domain of men and thus irrelevant to gender analysis, and American writers have frequently examined war according to traditional gender expectations: that boys become men by going to war and girls become women by building a home. Yet the writers discussed in this book complicate these expectations, since their female characters often take part directly in war and especially since their male characters repeatedly imagine domestic spaces for themselves in the midst of war. Chapters on Hemingway and the First World War, Kurt Vonnegut and the Second World War, and Tim O'Brien and the Vietnam War place these writers in their particular historical and cultural contexts while tracing similarities in their depiction of gender relationships, imagined domestic spaces, and the representability of trauma. The book concludes by examining post-9/11 American literature, probing what happenswhen the front lines actually come home to Americans. While much has been written about Hemingway, Vonnegut, O'Brien, and even 9/11 literature separately, this study is the first to bring them together in order to examine views about war, gender, and domesticity over a hundred-year period. It argues that 9/11 literature follows a long tradition of American writing about war in which the domestic and public realms are inextricably intertwined and in which imagined domestic spaces can provide a window into representing wartime trauma, an experience often thought to be unrepresentable or incomprehensible to those who were not actually there.Susan Farrell is Professor of English at the College of Charleston.

New essays providing fresh insights into the great 20th-century American poet Lowell, his writings, and his struggles.Robert Lowell (1917-1977) holds a place of unchallenged prominence in the poetic pantheon of the twentieth-century United States. He is an essential focal point for understanding the connection between poetry and American history,social justice, and personal identity. A recent spate of publications both by and about him, as well as allusions to him in the work of major American poets such as Wanda Coleman and Claudia Rankine, attest to his continued relevance.In March 2017, leading Lowell scholars from Europe and America gathered at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland in commemoration of his 100th birthday. The essays deriving from the conference and presented here aftercareful revision reveal new aspects of Lowell: for instance, the poet's influence on his peers, discussed by Thomas Travisano, the biographer of Elizabeth Bishop; or echoes of Milton in Lowell's work, discussed by Saskia Hamilton, editor of the forthcoming Dolphin Letters between Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick. Other essays examine Lowell's struggles with bipolar illness, with marriage, and with money; his economic views and his early personality issues with respect to his poetic production; his extended sojourn in Amsterdam; and his special relationship with Ireland. Several essays focus on his 1961 volume Imitations, his major poetic engagement with the European tradition, unjustly neglected in the US. The essays will appeal to the wide audience that Lowell scholarship continues to command.Contributors: Steven Gould Axelrod, Massimo Bacigalupo, Philip Coleman, Ian D. Copestake, Astrid Franke, Jo Gill, Saskia Hamilton, Frank J. Kearful, Grzegorz Kosc, Diederik Oostdijk, Francesco Rognoni, Thomas Travisano, Boris Vejdovsky.Thomas Austenfeld is Professor of American Literature at the University of Fribourg.

This book is a history of the nineteenth-century poetry of slavery and freedom framed as an argument about the nature of poetry itself: why we write it, why we read it, how it interacts with history.The poetry of the transatlantic abolitionist movement represented a powerful alliance across racial and religious boundaries; today it challenges the demarcation in literary studies between cultural and aesthetic approaches. Now is a particularly apt moment for its study. This book is a history of the nineteenth-century poetry of slavery and freedom framed as an argument about the nature of poetry itself: why we write it, why we read it, how it interacts with history. Poetry that speaks to a broad cross-section of society with moral authority, intellectual ambition, and artistic complexity mattered in the fraught years of the mid nineteenth century; Brian Yothers argues that it can and must matter today.Yothers examines antislavery poetry in light of recent work by historians, scholars in literary, cultural, and rhetorical studies, African-Americanists, scholars of race and gender studies, and theorists of poetics. That interdisciplinary sweep is mirrored by the range of writers he considers: from the canonical - Whitman, Barrett Browning, Beecher Stowe, DuBois, Melville - to those whose influence has faded - Longfellow, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, John Pierpont, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell - to African American writers whose work has been recovered in recent decades - James M. Whitfield, William Wells Brown, George Moses Horton, Frances E. W. Harper.

Shows that the writings of Paul Bowles, who is often seen as a literary renegade, owe much to the antinomian American tradition of Emerson and his literary descendants.Paul Bowles has often been considered a cult writer, a literary renegade: he lived more than fifty years as an expatriate in Morocco, and according to Norman Mailer, his works "let in the murder, the drugs, the incest . . . the call of the orgy, the end of civilization." In recent decades Bowles has found greater acceptance as a serious writer, as evidenced by the two-volume, 2,000-page Library of America edition of his works published in 2002. Still, he has rarely if ever been seen as having written in the antinomian tradition of Emerson and his literary descendants. The present book makes the case for doing so by demonstrating basic Emersonian attitudes and objectives in Bowles' life and works, especially in his focus on human consciousness and perception and on the need for the individual to escape from the trammels of social and cultural conditioning. Bowles' intellectual pursuits seem to have developed at first from his own spontaneous attitudes, which were then reinforced by his conservative and individualistic New England background on both sides of his family and deepened by a serious study of anthropology, Emersonian transcendentalism, and related "Oriental" thought such as the theosophy of Krishnamurti. Despite his half century in Tangier, Bowles is a writer who is thoroughly "in the American grain."