Bøger af Donald Pizer

This research work deals with subjects of great interest in current criticism---the impact of the New Historicist studies on the interpretation of American literary naturalism, and the issue of the possible persistence of the movement in contemporary fiction. Other essays deal with Norris, Crane and Dreiser who have up to now been considered canonical figures within literary naturalism while Wharton and Chopin are discussed as recent and welcome additions to the discussion of this movement and American literature in general. This work should be seen as a successor to Pizer's well received THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM (1993).

Since its 1925 publication, Manhattan Transfer has been widely recognized as a landmark in American modernism both for its jaundiced portrayal of the American Dream and for its experimentation with the novel form. Clear, factual annotations by the world's leading expert on Dos Passos's fi ction guides readers through the novel's dense representation of life in New York City during the turbulent early decades of the new century.

For American writers self-exiled to Paris during the 1920s and 1930s, the French capital represented what their homeland could not: a milieu that nurtured the full expression of the creative imagination. How these expatriates interpreted and gave modernist shape to the myth of "the Paris moment" is the focus of Donald Pizer's study.

A penetrating study of the anti-Semitic attitudes held by major American naturalist authors

In this collection of essays on Hamlin Garland, Donald Pizer attempts to re-establish the wealth and importance of the early work and activities of the radical, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer from the Midwest. Essays in the opening half of the book are devoted to Garland's radical economic and artistic beliefs and activities, while those in the second part concentrate on his most permanent, well-known work of this period: 'Main-Travelled Roads, Rose of Dutcher's Coolly', and 'A Son of the Middle Border'.In the preface to this volume, Pizer traces the overall coherence of Garland's early ideas and fiction. Garland, Pizer demonstrates, found in his reading of radical writers of the period an explanation of the hardships and limitations of prairie life that he had personally experienced; he then translated this union of concept and actuality into a powerful expressive tool in his acclaimed prairie fictions.Pizer includes several of his late essays on Garland in this book, in which he suggests, on the basis of his own critical development, that Garland's finest writing dealing with late nineteenth-century Midwestern life also contains sexual and Edenic themes which transcend the immediate social and economic conditions of this period and help to explain the significance and lastingness of his early body of work.

This book brings together for the first time, and in one convenient volume, published and unpublished memoirs about the American novelist Theodore Dreiser. The recollections of Dreiser's contemporaries bring to the fore the writer's politics, personal life, and literary reception. Donald Pizer is one of the world's leading scholars of Dreiser and of naturalism.

In addition to being a major twentieth-century author, John Dos Passos painted, principally in watercolor, throughout his career. This book reproduces 68 examples of Dos Passos' art, almost all in full color, presented in two parts containing 13 sections. In Part One, each section is devoted to a similar kind of art work produced within a specific time frame; in Part Two, each section consists of work in a specific genre. The book also includes essays devoted to the history and nature of Dos Passos' work as a pictorial artist and to the relationship of this work to his novels. It concludes with a survey of Dos Passos' art collections, exhibitions, and previous published illustrations and paintings. The book as a whole seeks to demonstrate that Dos Passos' lifelong commitment to and practice of pictorial representation are vital aspects of his career because they confirm and manifest in both verbal and visual stylistics such modernist tendencies as Fauvism, Cubism, and Expressionism. Both the essays and illustrations in this book argue for the importance of Dos Passos' paintings as keys to fully understanding the writer's complex body of work and, in their striking compositions and vibrant colors, as challenging objects of visual pleasure in their own right.

The Game as It Is Played comprises the best of Donald Pizer's essays on Theodore Dreiser. The essays explore several of the more controversial areas of Dreiser scholarship, including his late conversion to communism, his anti-Semitism, and the text of Sister Carrie.