American Literature

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  Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies

  Ann Beattie, Annie Dillard, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Marge Piercy, Anne Redmon, Anne Tyler, and Alice Walker all seem to be especially concerned with narrative management. The ten essays in this book raise new and intriguing questions about the ways these leading women writers appropriate and transform generic norms and ultimately revise literary tradition to make it more inclusive of female experience, vision, and expression.

  The contributors to this volume discover diverse narrative strategies. Beattie, Dillard, Paley, and Redmon in divergent ways rely heavily upon narrative gaps, surfaces, and silences, often suggesting depths which are ...Read More

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  Naturalism in American Fiction: The Classic Phase

  In this closely reasoned study, John J. Conder has created a new and more vital understanding of naturalism in American literature. Moving from the Hobbesian dilemma between causation and free will down through Bergson’s concept of dual selves, Conder defines a view of determinism so rich in possibilities that it can serve as the inspiration of literary works of astonishing variety and unite them in a single, though developing, naturalistic tradition in American letters.

  At the heart of this book, beyond its philosophic discussion, is Conder’s reading of key works in the naturalistic canon, beginning with Stephen Crane’s “The Open ...Read More

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  The Trail of the Lonesome Pine

  John Fox Jr. published this great romantic novel of the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky and Virginia in 1908, and the book quickly became one of America’s favorites. It has all the elements of a good romance—a superior but natural heroine, a hero who is an agent of progress and enlightenment, a group of supposedly benighted mountaineers to be drawn into the flow of mainstream American culture, a generous dose of social and class struggle, and a setting among the misty coves and cliffs of the blue Cumberlands.

  Reprinted with a foreword by John Ed Pearce, The Trail of the Lonesome ...Read More

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  Nineteenth-Century Southern Literature

  Few inhabitants of the South in 1800 thought of it as a “region” or of themselves as “southerners.” In time, the need to defend the entire southern way of life became obsessive for many writers, too often precluding efforts at originality in form or style. Especially after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, southern identity and southern nationalism emerged as the grand themes, and literature became subservient to regional interests. The devastation of the Civil War and the collapse of the Confederacy, instead of pointing southern writers in new directions, only intensified their preoccupation with a now-dead past.

  The popular ...Read More

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  The Run for the Elbertas

  In language both spare and colorful, sure in its command of Appalachian dialect and poetic in its evocation of mountain settings, James Still’s stories reveal the lives of his people—lives of privation and struggle, lived with honesty as well as humor. With a foreword by Cleanth Brooks and an afterword by the author, The Run for the Elbertas features thirteen stories from one of America’s masters of the short story. Enjoyable and enriching, Still’s stories sparkle with wisdom and joy.

  James Still (1906–2001) was the author of numerous works of fiction and poetry, including River of Earth; From the Mountain, ...Read More

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  River of Earth

  First published in 1940, James Still’s masterful novel has become a classic. It is the story, seen through the eyes of a boy, of three years in the life of his family and their kin. He sees his parents pulled between the meager farm with its sense of independence and the mining camp with its uncertain promise of material prosperity. In his world privation, violence, and death are part of everyday life, accepted and endured. Yet it is a world of dignity, love, and humor, of natural beauty which Still evokes in sharp, poetic images. No writer has caught more ...Read More

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  Mark Twain and the South

  The South was many things to Mark Twain: boyhood home, testing ground for manhood, and the principal source of creative inspiration. Although he left the South while a young man, seldom to return, it remained for him always a haunting presence, alternately loved and loathed. Mark Twain and the South was the first book on this major yet largely ignored aspect of the private life of Samuel Clemens and one of the major themes in his writing from 1863 until his death.

  Arthur G. Pettit clearly demonstrates that Mark Twain’s feelings on race and region moved in an intelligible direction ...Read More

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  Mark Twain and the Community

  Throughout his career Mark Twain viewed the relations between the individual and his community with mixed feelings, and this book explores both the ambiguities of Twain’s attitude and their effect upon his fiction. In the earlier novels—most notably The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn—the protagonist enjoys a dual position—at liberty to follow his own inclinations while retaining his conventional place as a respected member of the community—and the resolutions of these works are built upon this duality. Facing realities which the earlier fiction evaded, Twain in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court found himself in a dilemma ...Read More

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  Mark Twain and the Bible

  Mark Twain enthusiasts will welcome this study of the great writer’s attitude toward the Bible—and of the influence of Holy Writ upon both the man and the artist. While the theological beliefs of Twain have been well documented, Mr. Ensor’s study is the first to consider only his familiarity with the Bible and the extensive use of it in his writings.

  The Bible elicited by turns pious, skeptical, comical, and even hostile reactions in Twain, but he could not ignore it. Mr. Ensor examines manifestations of these conflicting impulses from the early newspaper articles to the autobiographical dictations; he suggests ...Read More