-
Conversations with Kentucky Writers
Kentucky and Kentuckians are full of stories, which may be why so many present-day writers have Kentucky roots. Whether they left and returned, like Wendell Berry and Bobbie Ann Mason, or adopted Kentucky as home, like James Still and Jim Wayne Miller, or grew up and left for good, like Michael Dorris and Barbara Kingsolver, they have one connection: Kentucky has influenced their writing and their lives. L. Elisabeth Beattie explores this influence in twenty intimate interviews.
Conversations with Kentucky Writers was more than three years in the making, as Beattie traveled across the state and beyond to capture oral ...Read More
-
Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century
Vincent Carretta has assembled the most comprehensive anthology ever published of writings by eighteenth-century people of African descent, capturing the surprisingly diverse experiences of blacks on both sides of the Atlantic--America, Britain, the West Indies, and Africa--between 1760 and 1798.
An important work for gaining an understanding of a heretofore little examined aspect of the eighteenth century. -- Bloomsbury Review
The selection of texts is diverse and wide-ranging. . . . The most comprehensive anthology on the subject and deserves to become the standard text for students in eighteenth-century studies and American studies. -- British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies
Establishes ...Read More
-
Run Me a River
The rich history of river life in Kentucky permeates Janice Holt Giles’s novel Run Me a River. Set in 1861, at the beginning of Kentucky’s reluctant entry into the Civil War, the novel tells the story of a five-day adventure on the Green River. Aboard the Rambler, a ramshackle steamboat, Captain Bohannon Cartwright and his crew journey 184 miles and pick up two extra passengers along the way. The boatmen rescue “Sir Henry” Cole, a former Shakespearean actor, and his granddaughter Phoebe from their skiff when it overruns in a squall. As romance blossoms between Phoebe and Captain Bo, a ...Read More
-
Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture: What Becomes a Legend Most
While vampire stories have been part of popular culture since the beginning of the nineteenth century, it has been in recent decades that they have become a central part of American culture. Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture looks at how vampire stories—from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Blacula , from Bela Lugosi’s films to Love at First Bite —have become part of our ongoing debate about what it means to be human. William Patrick Day looks at how writers and filmmakers as diverse as Anne Rice and Andy Warhol present the vampire as an archetype of human identity, as well ...Read More
-
Writers and Miners: Activism and Imagery in America
Coal miners evoke admiration and sympathy from the public, and writers—some seeking a muse, others a cause—traditionally champion them. David C. Duke explores more than one hundred years of this tradition in literature, poetry, drama, and film. Duke argues that as most writers spoke about rather than to the mining community, miners became stock characters in an industrial morality play, robbed of individuality or humanity. He discusses activist-writers such as John Reed, Theodore Dreiser, and Denise Giardina, who assisted striking workers, and looks at the writing of miners themselves. He examines portrayals of miners from The Trail of the Lonesome ...Read More
-
Yates Paul, His Grand Flights, His Tootings
James Baker Hall’s blackly comic coming-of-age novel has been denied, by unfortunate circumstances surrounding its original 1964 publication, its rightful place alongside classics such as Catcher in the Rye and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in the canon of essential late-twentieth-century American fiction.
Set in Lexington, Kentucky, the story unfolds through the eyes of thirteen-year-old Yates Paul. He becomes consumed with revelations about his inattentive father’s loneliness, his grandmother’s stormy relationship with his boisterous alcoholic uncle, and the frustration of being the best photography assistant in town when no one else knows it. In pursuing his career and falling ...Read More
-
Dixie Limited: Railroads, Culture, and the Southern Renaissance
In the South, railroads have two meanings: they are an economic force that can sustain a town and they are a metaphor for the process of southern industrialization. Recognizing this duality, Joseph Millichap’s Dixie Limited is a detailed reading of the complex and often ambivalent relationships among technology, culture, and literature that railroads represent in selected writers and works of the Southern Renaissance. Tackling such Southern Renaissance giants as Thomas Wolfe, Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, and William Faulkner, Millichap mingles traditional American and Southern studies—in their emphases on literary appreciation and evaluation in terms of national and regional concerns—with ...Read More
-
Henry James Goes to the Movies
Why has a nineteenth-century author with an elitist reputation proved so popular with directors as varied as William Wyler, François Truffaut, and James Ivory? A partial answer lies in the way many of Henry James’s recurring themes still haunt us: the workings of power, the position of women in society, the complexities of sexuality and desire.
Susan Griffin has assembled fifteen of the world’s foremost authorities on Henry James to examine both the impact of James on film and the impact of film on James. Anthony Mazella traces the various adaptations of The Turn of the Screw, from novel to ...Read More
-
The Humor of the Old South
The humor of the Old South—tales, almanac entries, turf reports, historical sketches, gentlemen’s essays on outdoor sports, profiles of local characters—flourished between 1830 and 1860. The genre’s popularity and influence can be traced in the works of major southern writers such as William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Harry Crews, as well as in contemporary popular culture focusing on the rural South.
This collection of essays includes some of the past twenty five years’ best writing on the subject, as well as ten new works bringing fresh insights and original approaches to the subject. A number of ...Read More
-
Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists: American Fiction after Postmodernism
Robert Rebein argues that much literary fiction of the 1980s and 90s represents a triumphant, if tortured, return to questions about place and the individual that inspired the works of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Faulkner, and other giants of American literature. Concentrating on the realist bent and regional orientation in contemporary fiction, he discusses in detail the various names by which this fiction has been described, including literary postmodernism, minimalism, Hick Chic, Dirty Realism, ecofeminism, and more. Rebein’s clearly written, nuanced interpretations of works by Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Louise Erdrich, Dorothy Allison, Barbara Kingsolver, E. Annie Proulx, Chris ...Read More
Printing is not supported at the primary Gallery Thumbnail page. Please first navigate to a specific Image before printing.
