As a novelist, essayist, critic, and theorist, Maurice Blanchot has earned tributes from authors as diverse as Jacques Derrida, Giles Deleuze, and Emmanuel Levinas. But their praise has told us little about what Blanchot's work actually says and why it has been so influential. In the first comprehensive study of this important French writer to ......
''Beaumont's chef-d'oeuvre was, and has remained, illuminating . . . It follows that to readers of the present work the book of 1835 will seem strangely and wonderfully familiar . . . Marie will be a book of echoes.''--George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville in America Gustave de Beaumont's 1835 work, Marie, or Slavery in the United States is ......
''Recognition of Mary Shelley's systemic dual focus on public and domestic power as the means to interrogate traditional norms and propose alternatives materially alters parochial perceptions of her objectives and her achievements. Her novels, outside of Frankenstein, and recently, The Last Man, have been dismissed as simple, mutual dissociated ......
Locating American Studies is a collection of seventeen essays first printed in American Quarterly, the journal of the American Studies Association. To mark the Association's celebration of its 50th anniversary in 1998, Lucy Maddox has brought together works by a distinguished group of scholars which ''provide a useful window into the history and ......
Named a notable book of the year by the New York Times and one of best biographies of 1988 by Publishers Weekly ''Anyone who has not read a life of Dickens is going to prefer Fred Kaplan's long, solid, and illuminating biography, furnished with new facts and theories, to any previous one they might encounter. The novelist who emerges from his ......
These stories, chosen from ten separately published collections of James T. Farrell's short fiction, offer remarkable insights into the lives of Irish Americans and other Chicagoans from 1910 to 1940. They are gems of the short fiction genre, unique, pioneering, and accomplished.Farrell's stories offer a wonderful diversity of characters and ......
''I'd rather fail in story writing than succeed in anything else,'' Josephine Herbst declared in 1913. The Iowa native's Trexler family trilogy, with Pity Is Not Enough as its first volume, shows clearly that Herbst in fact succeeded at storytelling. The book draws loosely on Herbst's family history, using Reconstruction's demise in Georgia to ......
William Monroe addresses what William J. Bennett ignores in The Book of Virtues: How do readers use literature as ''equipment for living''? Tackling modernism and postmodernism, Monroe outlines ''virtue criticism,'' an alternative to current theory. Focusing on works by T. S. Eliot, Vladimir Nabokov, and Donald Barthelme, he demonstrates that ......
The twelve contemporary fiction writers interviewed in Passion and Craft go beyond the merely autobiographical, revealing that, despite their differences, they share passionate devotion and discipline for their craft. Included are Richard Ford, winner in 1995 of both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award; Gina Berriault, 1997 winner of the ......
