Understanding Contemporary American Literature – serie

Understanding Contemporary American Literature was planned as a series of guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers. The word understanding in the series titles was deliberately chosen. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works: that is, what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed. These volumes provide instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers—identifying and explicating their material, themes, use of language, point of view, structures, symbolism, and responses to experience.

Understanding Contemporary American Literature was planned as a series of guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers. The word understanding in the series titles was deliberately chosen. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works: that is, what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed. These volumes provide instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers-identifying and explicating their material, themes, use of language, point of view, structures, symbolism, and responses to experience.

Since the publication in 1964 of his novel ""Last Exit to Brooklyn"", which arguably achieved the status of a cult classic, Hubert Selby, Jr., has held a place as one of the foremost exponents of American underground literature. His work has yet to receive extensive critical attention, in part because of its deliberately shocking subject matter and its resistance to precise classification. In ""Understanding Hubert Selby, Jr."", James R. Giles examines the writer's four novels and one collection of short stories to make the case that the full complexity of his fiction has not previously been understood. Giles contends that Selby's writings, which are usually labelled as either ""naturalistic"" or ""surrealistic"", represent an innovative merger of both narrative modes. In addition to ""Last Exit to Brooklyn"", Giles provides close readings of ""The Room"", ""The Demon"", ""Requiem for a Dream"", and Selby's little-known collection of short stories, ""Song of the Silent Snow"".

Describing Flannery O'Connor's fiction as ""violent, grotesque and horribly funny, with a twist"", Margaret Earley Whitt explores the canon of the Georgia writer whose work has long haunted and harassed its readers. In a comprehensive survey that encompasses O'Connor's short stories, novels, essays and letters, as well as the body of criticism that has proliferated since her death in 1964, Whitt illumines the religious themes and bizarre characters that make O'Connor's prose so different from that of other American writers. Whitt discusses the components that drive the writer's work: her Southernness and her Roman Catholicism. The blend of these two enabled her to deliver orthodox Christian themes through the code of southern etiquette.

Understanding Jill McCorkle introduces readers to the novels and short story collections of Jill McCorkle's growing canon. Since 1984 McCorkle has written five novels and two books of short stories, entering the publishing world, as one reviewer noted, ""with the literary equivalent of a rebel yell"". Filling the gap of critical study on McCorkle, Barbara Bennett analyzes the widely read and admired output of this prolific southern woman writer. Bennett identifies and discusses the diverse characters, thematic concerns and keen sense of language that distinguish McCorkle's work. Bennett offers a brief overview of McCorkle's life, traces the influence on her work, and places her decisively in the ""third generation"" of 20th-century southern writers. While noting McCorkle's links to such prominent southern women writers as Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, Bennett explains how McCorkle's characterizations, attitude of affirmation and references to popular culture distance her from her predecessors. Bennett devotes individual chapters to each of McCorkle's novels and story collections. She discusses the themes that unify these diverse works, including the tension between independence and dependence, the imbuing presence of strength in femininity, the direct conflict between the nurturing of others and the preservation of self, and the opposition of purity and virginity to sexual freedom and expression. Bennett explores McCorkle's development of characters ranging from a young white girl approaching womanhood to a troubled middle-aged man reviewing his life's choices, from an elderly black woman on the verge of retirement to a yound minister struggling with his career path. She finds that in such rich and varied voices, McCorkle crafts stories of a region no longer burdened by the past but now grappling with ordinary family problems.

An analysis introducing Mason's nonfiction prose, short stories and novels. Price sheds light on the writer's distinctive style and thematic concerns in her writings about contemporary Western Kentucky.

UNDERSTANDING ANNIE PROULX introduces readers to the writings of a Pulitzer Prize-winning author best known for the novels Postcards, The Shipping News, and Accordion Crimes. In addition to examining the lyrical prose, wealth of detail, and distinctive characterization that have brought Proulx widespread praise, Karen L. Rood identifies and analyzes the novelist's primary thematic concern - the way ordinary people conduct their lives in the face of massive social, economic, and ecological change. Rood chronicles Proulx's childhood, development as a writer, and relatively late entry into fiction writing. (Proulx published her first story collection at the age of fifty-seven). Rood suggests that Proulx's early years served as a long and valuable apprenticeship for her mature fiction. In separate chapters Rood provides critical appraisals of Proulx's two short-story collections and three novels. She discusses how in these works Proulx warns her readers about the dire consequences, for both the globe and those inhabiting it, of the headlong rush toward modernization. She also traces Proulx's ambitious attempt to define American life in all its aspects, underlining the vast disparity between Americans' idealized vision of their past and the real history of violence and prejudice that has shaped the nation as it is today.

Widely known as Broadway's king of comedy, Neil Simon has written such popular and critical successes as ""Barefoot in the Park"", ""The Odd Couple"", ""Brighton Beach Memoirs"" and the Pulitzer Prize-winning ""Lost in Yonkers"". In this guide to his work, Susan Koprince provides an overview of Simon's career and in-depth analyses of his major plays. Koprince suggests that, in addition to - or in spite of - his unmatched commercial success as a writer of comedy, Simon qualifies as a master dramatist of 20th-century theatre. Koprince recounts Simon's emergence from humble Jewish American origins to celebrated status as the most commercially successful playwright in the history of American theatre. She traces Simon's style to Greek New Comedy, acknowledges his affinity with Jewish humour, and emphasizes the Chekhovian blend of humour and pathos that has become the hallmark of Simon's writing. From ""Come Blow Your Horn"", to ""Laughter on the 23rd Floor"", Koprince examines 16 of Simon's most significant works. She underscores the range of Simon's dramaturgy and evaluates the reasons for Simon's popularity, including his gift for verbal and situational humour, his commitment to traditional values, and his mastery of a comedic style in which humour and sadness are inextricably intertwined.

This work is an appraisal of six theorists who have shaped America's literary landscape; Stanley Fish, Susan Bordo, Paul de Man, Henry Louis Gates Jr, Edward W.Said and Stephen Greenblatt. Underscoring the largely heterogenous mix of strategies and suppositions that these critics represent it offers concise analyses of their principle claims and illustrates how their works reflect a range of critical perspectives, from deconstruction, African American studies, and reader-response theory to political criticism, the new historicism and feminism. The study is prefaced with a short history of theory and criticism in the twentieth century and each of the theorists is placed within the larger context of contemporary criticism. It explains their specific strategies for interpreting literature, identifies the philosophical assumptions underlying those strategies, cites specific examples of how the strategies are applied to the reading of particular works, and notes possible objections to their theories.

The definitive introduction to the complex author of ""The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter."" Updated with a discussion of recent scholarship, ""Understanding Carson McCullers"" provides a balanced introductory study of the Georgia-born novelist's major fiction and the reasons for her extraordinary and lasting acclaim. Carson McCullers was deemed the ""find of the decade"" when she appeared on the literary scene at the age of twenty-three and is best remembered for her celebrated novels ""The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter"" and ""The Member of the Wedding."" Through Virginia Spencer Carr's insightful discussion and lucid analysis of these and lesser-known works, McCullers is shown here as more than a southern writer, more than a lesbian novelist. McCullers emerges as a complex and multifaceted artist not yet fully comprehended and deserving of more contemplative study and thoughtful understanding.

Understanding Jamaica Kincaid introduces readers to the prizewinning author best known for the novels ""Annie John"", ""Lucy"", and ""The Autobiography of My Mother"". Justin D. Edwards surveys Jamaica Kincaid's life, career, and major works of fiction and nonfiction to identify and discuss her recurring interests in familial relations, Caribbean culture, and the aftermath of colonialism and exploitation. In addition to examining the haunting prose, rich detail, and personal insight that have brought Kincaid widespread praise, Edwards also identifies and analyzes the novelist's primary thematic concerns - the flow of power and the injustices faced by people undergoing social, economic, and political change. Edwards chronicles Kincaid's childhood in ""Antigua"", her development as a writer, and her early journalistic work as published in the ""New Yorker"" and other magazines. In separate chapters he provides critical appraisals of Kincaid's early novels; her works of nonfiction, including ""My Brother"" and ""A Small Place""; and her more recent novels, including ""Mr. Potter"". Edwards discusses the way in which Kincaid both exposes the problems of colonization and neocolonization and warns her readers about the dire consequences of inequality in the era of globalization.

This is a comprehensive guide to the writing career of the author of ""Angels in America"".""Understanding Tony Kushner"" surveys the acclaimed writings of the author of the Pulitzer Prize - winning drama ""Angels in America"" and coauthor of the Academy Award-nominated screenplay for the film ""Munich"". Viewing Kushner as a sociopolitical dramatist in the tradition of Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, James Fisher guides readers through Kushner's influences and creations to map the importance of the writer's body of work in expanding the postmodern literary and cultural landscapes. After grounding his discussions in Kushner's early plays, ""A Bright Room Called Day"" and ""Hydriotaphia"", or ""The Death of Dr. Brown"", Fisher engages with the two plays of ""Angels in America"" to identify the major themes to be revisited in subsequent works. Fisher reads the depiction of the clash of values in the mid-1980s in Angels as Kushner's placement of humanity's fate at the nexus of divergent views on morality, politics, religion, history, gender, and sexuality, views that complicate individual and national identity and beg the overarching question, is change to be embraced or challenged? Fisher concludes with an exploration of how Kushner moves his themes from stage to screen in Munich and the forthcoming film Lincoln, both directed by Steven Spielberg.

This is a literary roadmap to navigating the ""Trilogy of Trilogies"" by one of America's most celebrated poets.One of America's most accomplished and honored contemporary poets, Charles Wright has received the PEN Translation Prize, the National Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and numerous other honors. In this first book-length study of Wright's extensive body of work, Joe Moffett offers readers an introduction to the books and themes that have defined the poet's illustrious career.Wright's major work centers around a lengthy self-described ""Trilogy of Trilogies"" project consisting of ""Country Music"", ""The World of the Ten Thousand Things"", and ""Negative Blue"", in which each volume is a collection of poems stemming from a different trio of books. In his study of the trilogy, Moffett finds Wright returning to the distinctive landscape and culture of his native Appalachia in poetic quests for spiritual meaning. Early on, Wright was indoctrinated in the Episcopal Church and later garnered an impressive knowledge of Eastern religion, mysticism, and philosophy; thus the poet is deeply conversant in a wide range of spiritual texts and freely draws from this material in his continuing contemplations on the divine. Moffett views this extended engagement between place and spirituality as key to understanding Wright's vision.Moffett concludes with a survey of Wright's three subsequent volumes of poetry - ""A Short History of the Shadow"", ""Buffalo Yoga"", and ""Scar Tissue"" - as a continuation of the poetic style and dialogue between Southern landscapes and divine influences that defined the earlier trilogies.

This is the first critical companion to the works of this darkly comic short story writer and novelist. ""Understanding T. C. Boyle"" is the first book-length study of one of contemporary America's most prolific, popular, and critically acclaimed fiction writers. The author of seven short story collections and eleven novels, T. C. Boyle has been honored with the 1988 PEN/Faulkner Award for ""World's End"", the 1997 Prix Medicis Etranger for ""The Tortilla Curtain"", the 1999 PEN/Malamud Award for ""T. C. Boyle: Stories"", and a 2003 National Book Award nomination for ""Drop City"". Boyle's 1993 novel, ""The Road to Wellville"", was adapted into a feature film. Paul Gleason begins his investigation of Boyle's work by exploring the biographical, historical, and literary contexts at play in the writer's fiction. Gleason maps the literary influences that shaped Boyle's 'wise guy' style, among them Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, and Samuel Beckett. The volume then features chapters on Boyle's short fiction and his novels of the past three decades. Gleason demonstrates Boyle's literary development as entertainer, absurdist, social commentator and critic, and historical novelist who chronicles the baby boomer generation while addressing a range of contemporary social issues, such as race relations, illegal immigration, and feminism. Gleason shows how Boyle uses dark humor as a moral and satiric force for social commentary in the tradition of writers such as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. Though the entertainment value of Boyle's writing has much to do with his popularity, Gleason also sees him as an iconoclast who questions his generation's ideals, philosophies, and actions.

This is a critical survey of works by a writer torn between Emersonian engagement and Dickinsonesque withdrawal.""Understanding Richard Powers"" presents an introduction to one of the most important and admired writers to emerge in the post-Pynchon era of American literature. Joseph Dewey contends that while Powers' novels investigate the most pressing issues of the new millennium, the novelist is most deeply interested in the same thematic argument that consumed Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson - the problem of the self, the deep and unshakable loneliness that has always been at the heart of the American literary imagination.Through an overview of Powers' career and close readings of his novels, which include ""Galatea 2.2"", ""Prisoner's Dilemma"", ""The Gold Bug Variations"", ""Operation Wandering Soul"", ""Gain"", and ""Plowing the Dark"", Dewey places Powers in context as a major voice in the first generation born entirely within the era of television and the computer and shows us how Powers reminds his readers that we have never been so connected and yet never quite so alone.

This is a valuable companion to the works of an acclaimed Native American writer.In ""Understanding James Welch"", Ron McFarland offers analysis and critical commentary on the works of the renowned Blackfeet - Gros Ventre writer whose first novel, ""Winter in the Blood"", has become a classic in Native American fiction and whose book of poems, ""Riding the Earthboy 40"", has remained in print since its initial publication in 1971. McFarland offers close readings of Welch's poems and five novels, as well as his volume of nonfiction, ""Killing Custer"", which tells the story of the Battle of the Little Bighorn from a Native American perspective.Demonstrating how Welch wrote each of the novels from a different angle, McFarland finds the writer's focus to be on the picaresque in ""Winter in the Blood"", on tragic inevitability in ""The Death of Jim Loney"", on epic qualities in ""Fools Crow"", and on the element of intrigue in ""The Indian Lawyer"". McFarland draws on interviews with Welch, book reviews, and a growing body of secondary scholarly commentary to reflect on Welch's evolution as a writer, his interest in the landscape and the psychological life of his characters, his use of Native American lore and regionalist elements, and his thematic concerns - particularly the identity motif.

This is the first book-length critical approach to the fiction of the award-winning author of ""Birds of America"". ""Understanding Lorrie Moore"" is a comprehensive companion to the works of this wickedly humorous writer, whose fiction shows a deep sensitivity to the dynamics of contemporary gender relations and an abiding interest in portraying and critiquing the American national character. The recipient of the 1998 O. Henry Award and the 2004 Rea Award for the Short Story, Lorrie Moore is best known for her short fiction. Alison Kelly shows that Moore's virtuosic prose, wry humor, and sense of irony are tools for registering how Americans face the discomfort of their daily lives as individuals and as a nation. Kelly traces Moore's emergence as a writer in the 1980s and her artistic development up to the present day, illuminating the distinctive narrative methods, aesthetics, and thematic preoccupations of Moore's major works. Kelly follows Moore's recurrent characters, situations, metaphors, and motifs in order to promote understanding of the texts and appreciation for their wordplay, wit, and imagery. Viewing her subject as a subtly political writer, Kelly discusses Moore's major themes, techniques, and stylistics as evidence that her characters' private pains are symptomatic of a wider national malaise.

This is a comprehensive survey of the genre-jumping author's impressive body of work. ""Understanding Thomas Berger"" introduces readers to a veteran novelist best known for his wry explorations of the dialectic between the great American dream and the realities of middle-class American life. As Brooks Landon notes, Berger openly resists easy classification. Indeed Berger's uncanny ability to satirize literary genres while participating in them has defined his career and led to such novels as his classic Westerns ""Little Big Man"" and ""The Return of Little Big Man"", his detective story ""Who Is Teddy Villanova?"", his Arthurian romance Arthur Rex, and his epic ""Reinhart"" series. Landon approaches these works thematically to advance understanding of Berger's motives, influences, techniques, style, and language - and it is language that seems key to unlocking Berger's puzzle. Landon's study carves fresh inroads into the complex literary landscape of this grimly comic moralist and master of fiction's many forms.

This is a critical survey of the complete body of work by the author of ""Catch-22"". In this revised edition, Sanford Pinsker explores the idiosyncratic vision that permeates Heller's writings, as he maps the dark terrain Heller carved out, novel by novel, with considerable verbal dazzle and the uncompromising outrage of the classical satirist. This updated edition includes new chapters on Closing Time, the sequel to ""Catch-22""; ""Now and Then"", Heller's memoir of growing up in Brooklyn; Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, his posthumously published novel; and ""Catch as Catch Can"", a collection of assorted short stories and sketches.

This is a concise companion to the novels of the king of the Beats. ""Understanding Jack Kerouac"" introduces readers to what Matt Theado calls Kerouac's 'unwieldy accretion of published work' - fiction, poetry, nonfiction, selected letters, religious writing, and 'true-story novels'. Presenting this cultural icon of the Beat Generation primarily as a writer rather than as a social rebel or media celebrity, Theado elucidates the reasons Kerouac's reputation has outlived disparaging beatnik associations and why his writings continue to attract an expanding readership. Theado takes a book-by-book approach to the sometimes-confusing canon and develops a framework for understanding Kerouac's thematic concerns, writing techniques, and artistic evolution. Proposing that the real legend of Jack Kerouac is the saga of a writer at work, Theado suggests that as recognition of Kerouac's artistic achievement grows, the Duluoz Legend - Kerouac's series of barely fictionalized re-creations of his life - outgrows the genre of autobiography and becomes an intimate chronicle of a writer's stylistic maturation. Theado traces Kerouac's development as a crafter of language and contends that spontaneous prose, Kerouac's literary hallmark, may prove to be his chief claim to literary longevity.

This is a guidebook into the fantastic world of a science fiction legend. Author of more than forty novels and myriad short stories over a three-decade literary career, Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) single-handedly reshaped twentieth-century science fiction. His influence has only increased since his death with the release of numerous feature films based on his work, including ""Blade Runner"", ""Total Recall"", ""Minority Report"", and ""Next"". Viewing his subject as foremost a novelist of ideas, Eric Carl Link surveys Dick's own tragicomic biography, his craft and career, and the recurrent ideas and themes that give shape and significance to his fiction. Link addresses Dick's efforts to break into the mainstream in the 1950s, his return to science fiction in the 1960s, and his move toward more theologically oriented work in his final two decades. Link finds in Dick's writing an intellectual curiosity that transformed his bizarre pulp extravaganzas into philosophically challenging explorations of reality.

This book offers an insightful introduction to the strikingly imaginative range of a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. This fully updated edition of the only book-length study of Jane Smiley serves as a comprehensive survey of the innovative author's literary career in relation to her social, intellectual, and creative convictions. Neil Nakadate's study is organized around close readings of Smiley's major fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel ""A Thousand Acres"". Nakadate also examines her key essays and nonfiction as a means of adding an additional perspective on her novels. The volume's updated biographical material benefits from an unpublished interview conducted with Smiley in 2008, and the citations and extensive bibliography have also been updated, making this new edition an ideal point of entrance for readers eager to understand Smiley's complete body of work.

This book offers an introduction to the works of a Cajun writer who finds optimism in his blue-collar tales. Margaret Donovan Bauer presents the first book-length study of the Louisiana storyteller, who injects a seldom heard Cajun voice into Southern literature and offers a rare optimistic vision among other contemporary writers of the hardscrabble American South. Bauer surveys Tim Gautreaux's three novels - ""The Next Step in the Dance"", ""The Clearing, and ""The Missing"" - and two collections of short fiction - ""Same Place, Same Things"" and ""Welding with Children"" - to identify his major themes, character types, and structures. She views his chief contribution to Southern letters to be an authentic insider's view of Cajun culture, one resulting in a skillful, realistic, and sympathetic vision of historical and contemporary Acadiana in flux. Bauer addresses how Gautreaux's hopeful vision distinguishes him from other contemporary writers of the blue-collar South. She views Gautreaux's poor white protagonists as action-oriented characters who, while trapped by circumstances, still strive to affect positive change in their lives.

This is a critical companion to Vonnegut's early novels. ""Understanding Kurt Vonnegut"" is a critical analysis of Vonnegut's fiction as a point of entrance for students and general readers alike. In close readings of Vonnegut's novels, William Rodney Allen examines the distinctive stylistic, thematic, and formally innovative elements that earned Vonnegut (1922-2007) a mass following, especially among young readers, as well as critical respect among scholars.