Bøger i Understanding Contemporary American Literature serien

An illuminating study of an award-winning writer who captured the complex challenges twentieth-century women faced in their struggle for independence. In Understanding Alice Adams, Bryant Mangum examines the thematic intricacies and astute social commentary of Adams's eleven novels and five short story collections.

A guide to the fantastic world of a science fiction legendAuthor 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 and television series based on his work, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, and The Man in the High Castle. In Understanding Philip K. Dick, Eric Carl Link introduces readers to the life, career, and work of this groundbreaking, prolific, and immeasurably influential force in American literature, media culture, and contemporary science fiction.Dick was at times a postmodernist, a mainstream writer, a pulp fiction writer, and often all three simultaneously, but as Link illustrates, he was more than anything else a novelist of ideas. From this vantage point, Link surveys Dick's tragicomic biography, his craft and career, and the recurrent ideas and themes that give shape and significance to his fiction. Link finds across Dick's writing career an intellectual curiosity that transformed his science fiction novels from bizarre pulp extravaganzas into philosophically challenging explorations of the nature of reality, and it is this depth of vision that continues to garner new audiences and fresh approaches to Dick's genre-defining tales.

Introduces readers to one of the most influential American writers of the last half- century. Henry Veggian traces the evolution of DeLillo's work through the three phases of his career as a fiction writer, from the experimental early novels, through the critically acclaimed works of the mid-1980s and 1990s, into the smaller but newly innovative novels of the last decade.

The winner of every major American literary prize, John Updike (1932-2009) was one of the most popular and prolific novelists of his time and a major cultural figure who traced the high point and fall of midcentury American self-confidence and energy. A superb stylist with sixty books to his credit, he brilliantly rendered the physical surfaces of the nation's life even as he revealed the intense longings beneath those surfaces. In Understanding John Updike, Frederic Svoboda elucidates the author's deep insights into the second half of the twentieth century as seen through the lives of ordinary men and women. He offers extended close readings of Updike's most significant works of fiction, templates through which his entire oeuvre may be understood. A small-town Pennsylvanian whose prodigious talent took him to Harvard, a staff position at the New Yorker, and ultimately a life in suburban Massachusetts, where the pace of his literary output never slowed, Updike was very much in the American cultural tradition. His series of Rabbit Angstrom novels strongly echo Sinclair Lewis's earlier explorations of middle America, while The Witches of Eastwick and related novels are variations on Nathaniel Hawthorne's nineteenth-century classic The Scarlet Letter. His number-one best seller Couples examines what Time magazine called "e;the adulterous society"e; in the last year of the Kennedy administration, following the nation's fall from idealism into self-centeredness. Understanding John Updike will give both new readers and those already familiar with the author a firm grasp of his literary achievement. This outline of Updike's professional career highlights his importance in the life of the nation-not only as a novelist but also as a gifted essayist, reviewer, cultural critic, and poet.

Since the early 1980s, Jim Grimsley has received increasing acclaim for his achievements in a variety of dramatic and literary genres. David Deutsch offers the first book-length study of Grimsley's diverse work and argues for his vital role in shaping the contemporary queer American literary scene.

Offers the first comprehensive study of Marilynne Robinson's fiction and essays to date, providing an overview of the author's life, themes, and literary and religious influences. Through close readings of the novels and essay collections, Alex Engebretson uncovers the unifying elements of Robinson's work.

A companion to the novels of the king of the Beats. It 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'.

Offers close readings of James 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. This title demonstrates how Welch wrote each of the novels from a different angle.

Explores the idiosyncratic vision that permeates Heller's writings, and maps the dark terrain Heller carved out, novel by novel, with considerable verbal dazzle.

Updated critical commentary with discussion of four additional novels

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. This book 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.

Presents an analysis of Vonnegut's fiction as a point of entrance for students and general readers. This title 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.

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."" This book provides a balanced introductory study of her major fiction and shows her as more than a lesbian novelist.

Surveys Flannery O'Connor's short stories, novels, essays and letters, as well as the body of criticism that has proliferated since her death in 1964. The book illumines the religious themes and bizarre characters that make O'Connor's prose so different from that of other American writers.

Presents an introduction to Richard Powers - one of the important and admired writers to emerge in the post-Pynchon era of American literature. This title places Powers in context as a major voice in the first generation born entirely within the era of television and the computer.

Through critical readings, Gerald Alva Miller, Jr. examines the life of William S. Burroughs and the evolution of his various radical styles not just in writing but also in audio, film, and painting. Miller argues that Burroughs, more than any other author, ushered in the era of both postmodern fiction and poststructural philosophy.

Introduces readers to the author known for the novels ""Annie John"", ""Lucy"", and ""The Autobiography of My Mother"". This work surveys Jamaica Kincaid's life, career, and works of fiction and nonfiction to identify and discuss her interests in familial relations, Caribbean culture, and aftermath of colonialism and exploitation.

The Harlem-born son of a storefront preacher, James Baldwin died almost thirty years ago, but his spirit lives on in the eloquent and still-relevant musings of his novels, short stories, essays, and poems. In Understanding James Baldwin, Marc Dudley shows that a proper grasp of Baldwin's work begins with a grasp of the times in which he wrote.

Grounded in feminism, political activism, and Jewish spirituality, Marge Piercy's work includes more than thirty volumes of poetry, and fiction written over nearly five decades. Donna Bickford offers a discussion of the major themes revealed in her essays and nonfiction. She then treats Piercy's novels in four thematic and chronological groups.

The winner of every major American literary prize, John Updike (1932-2009) was one of the most popular and prolific novelists of his time and a major cultural figure who traced the high point and fall of mid-century American self-confidence and energy. This volume offers a close look at the extraordinary literary achievements of this popular and prolific American author.

Understanding Sharon Olds explores this Pulitzer Prize-winning poet's major themes, characters, life, and career, including her often-controversial portrayals of family dysfunction, sexuality, and violence against women. In this first book dedicated entirely to the poetry of Sharon Olds, Russell Brickey examines how Olds approaches these difficult and complex topics with pathos and intimate, sometimes provocatively private, details through poetry that not all her critics appreciate. Olds has never shied away from difficult subject matter. Her first award-winning book, Satan Says, is a feminist exploration of gender politics and adolescent discovery. The Father comprises a book-length elegy about cancer. Stag's Leap, Olds's Pulitzer Prize-winning volume, is a surprisingly tender look at divorce in modern American culture. Extremely personal, her poems often deal with the victories and contradictions of being a woman in the United States during a time when the country is often involved in racial upheavals and military conflicts overseas. She investigates the victories and contradictions of being a wife and mother during the era of feminism, as one of our most honest, most overt poets of female sexuality and its relationship to family life and its place within the history of humanity. Brickey organizes each chapter around a theme or a persona within Olds's cast of characters. These include poems dedicated to mothers, fathers, children, and the arc of history. Through his close readings, Brickey shows how and where Olds has expanded the tradition of confessional poetry (literature that deals with psychology, family, love, and sexuality), a term Olds disdains but nevertheless expanded into commentary about the human condition in all its paradoxes.

With the publication of Susan Sontag's diaries, the development of her career can now be evaluated in a more genetic sense, so that the origins of her ideas and plans for publication are made plain in the context of her role as a public intellectual, who is increasingly aware of her impact on her culture. In Understanding Susan Sontag, Carl Rollyson not only provides an introduction to her essays, novels, plays, films, diaries, and uncollected work published in various periodicals, he now has a lens through which to reevaluate classic texts such as Against Interpretation and On Photography, providing both students and advanced scholars a renewed sense of her importance and impact. Rollyson devotes separate chapters to Sontag's biography; her early novels; her landmark essay collections Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will; her films; her major mid-career books, On Photography and its sequel, Regarding the Pain of Others; and Illness as Metaphor and its sequel, AIDS and Its Metaphors, together with her groundbreaking short story, "e;The Way We Live Now."e; Sontag's later essay collections and biographical profiles, collected in Under the Sign of Saturn, Where the Stress Falls, and At The Same Time: Essays and Speeches, also receive a fresh assessment, as does her later work in short fiction, the novel, and drama, with a chapter discussing I, etcetera; two historical novels, The Volcano Lover and In America; and her plays, A Parsifal, Alice in Bed, and her adaptation of Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea. Chapters on her diaries and uncollected prose, along with a primary and secondary bibliography, complete this comprehensive study.

Offers a thoughtful examination of the life and work of William Gibson, author of eleven novels and twenty short stories. This study situates Gibson as a major figure in both science fiction history and contemporary American fiction, and it traces how his aesthetic affected both areas of literature.

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.

Pat Conroy's work as a novelist and a memoirist has indelibly shaped the image of the American South in the cultural imagination. His writing has rendered the physical landscape of the South Carolina lowcountry familiar to legions of readers, and it has staked out a more complex geography as well, one defined by domestic trauma, racial anxiety, religious uncertainty, and cultural ambivalence. In Understanding Pat Conroy, Catherine Seltzer engages in a sustained consideration of Conroy and his work. The study begins with a sketch of Conroy's biography, a narrative that, while fascinating in its own right, is employed here to illuminate many of the motifs and characters that define his work and to locate him within southern literary tradition. The volume then moves on to explore each of Conroy's major works, tracing the evolution of the themes within and among each of his novels, including The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, The Prince of Tides, Beach Music, and South of Broad, and his memoirs, among them The Water Is Wide and My Losing Season. Seltzer's insightful close readings of Conroy's work are supplemented by interviews and archival material, shedding new light on the often-complex dynamics between text and context in Conroy's oeuvre. More broadly Understanding Pat Conroy also explores the ways that Conroy delights in troubling the boundaries that circumscribe the literary establishment. Seltzer links Conroy's work to existing debates about the contemporary American canon, and, like Conroy's work itself, Understanding Pat Conroy will be of interest to his readers, students of American literature, and new and veteran South watchers.

An appraisal of six theorists who have shaped America's literary landscape. It offers analyses of their principle claims and illustrates how their works reflect a range of critical perspectives, also including a short history of 20th-century theory and criticism.

Provides a new direction for Capote studies that offers a way to reconsider the author's work. By reading Capote's work in its historical context, Fahy reveals the politics shaping his writing and refutes any notion of Capote as disconnected from the political. Instead this study positions him as a writer deeply engaged with the social anxieties of the 1940s and 1950s.

Introduces readers to the author best known for Postcards and The Shipping News. The book examines her lyrical prose and wealth of detail, and analyses her primary thematic concern - the way ordinary people conduct their lives in the face of massive social, economic, and ecological change.

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.

In examining the four novels and one collection of short stories by Hubert Selby Jr, this author argues that the full complexity of his fiction has not previously been understood. It contends that Selby's writings, represent an innovative merger of two narrative modes.