Literature in English, North America

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  Jesse Stuart: Essays on His Work

  J. R. LeMaster and Mary Washington Clarke have here assembled a distinguished collection of essays on the works of Jesse Stuart. A prolific writer, Stuart is at home in many different genres; his poetry, his short stories, his novels, and his autobiographical writings are widely known, and his books for children have enjoyed great popularity. Despite the variety of his work and despite the diversity of the ten essayists' points of view, there emerges from this volume a consistent view of a man whose close contact with the land and the people of his region has produced a distinctive body ...Read More

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  The Poetic Vision of Robert Penn Warren

  Though it has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize, the poetry of Robert Penn Warren still is not widely or well understood. In this study, Victor H. Strandberg redresses this imbalance by providing a comprehensive survey of the poetic canon of this gifted, complex, and much-neglected poet.

  Warren writes in the tradition of Western poets concerned with the painful experience of a forced, one-way passage from innocence into “the world’s stew” of time and loss. This passage, Strandberg explains, results for Warren in bifurcation of the self into warring segments: a “clean” idealistic surface ...Read More

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  The Mystery of Iniquity: Melville as Poet, 1857–1891

  This book is the first to consider the work of Herman Melville’s later years as a whole, in the light of his life and reading during those years and of the intellectual and artistic ambience of the later nineteenth century. With the exception of Billy Budd, almost all of the writing Melville produced between 1857 and 1891 is poetry. Until now little attention has been given to the poetry and it has been customary to view Melville’s final masterpiece, Billy Budd, against the background of the earlier fiction—almost as if the writing of the intervening thirty-four years had not existed.

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  The Eternal Crossroads: The Art of Flannery O'Connor

  Flannery O’Connor was a writer of extraordinary power and virtuosity. Her strong supple prose blends humor, pathos, satire, and grotesquerie which leads the reader to the evil at the center of the self’s labyrinth. There, she confronts that evil with originality and power, pulling the reader into consideration of the terrifying dependencies of love in the recesses of the heart.

  This study focuses on Flannery O’Connor’s sense of the coincidence of the eternal and cosmic with worldly time and place—“the eternal crossroads”— and how that sense controls and infuses her fiction. From an examination of various influences upon Miss O’Connor’s ...Read More

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  The Pictorial Mode: Space and Time in the Art of Bryant, Irving, and Cooper

  Focusing on style as a means of thematic expression, Donald A. Ringe in this study examines in detail the affinities that exist between the paintings of the Hudson River school and the works of William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper. The emphasis on physical description of nature that characterizes the work of these writers, he finds, is not simply an imitation of European models, nor is it merely nonfunctional decoration. Rather, he demonstrates that the authors’ concern with description of the physical world derives from the late eighteenth-century theory of knowledge, and specifically from the concepts of ...Read More

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  William Faulkner: From Jefferson to the World

  Combining explications of William Faulkner’s novels and short stories with thematic analysis, Hyatt H. Waggoner works from the close reading of a specific work outward to its most general meanings and relationships. By this method he has made a significant contribution to the understanding of Faulkner’s career and artistic achievement.

  Waggoner examines both better and lesser-known works, which yield valuable insights into Faulkner’s development when treated in relation to his whole body of work. The author also addresses the major themes which emerge from critical analyses of individual works: Faulkner’s uneasy relationship with his Christian background and his unchanging conception ...Read More

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  Bluegrass Cavalcade

  Kentucky history centers on the Bluegrass; this is not to say that the rest of Kentucky does not have a rich story, but chronologically, the beginning was here. Too, Bluegrass history can scarcely be separated from the rest of the state. Boonesboro and Harrodsburg, Henry Clay and Elizabeth Madox Roberts are the cherished possessions of all Kentuckians. Jane Todd Crawford and Dr. Ephraim McDowell stood in for humanity. It is a great matter of local pride that they did so in Kentucky.

  Bluegrass Cavalcade brings together fifty-five Kentucky writers to write about their home state and to capture a taste ...Read More