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Author: David S. Reynolds
Publisher: Historical Guides to American Authors
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 292
ISBN-13: 9780195120820
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This Guide combines contemporary cultural studies and historical scholarship to illuminate Whitman's diverse contexts. The essays explore dimensions of Whitman's dynamic relationship to working-class politics, race and slavery, sexual mores, the visual arts & the idea of democracy.
Author: David S. Reynolds
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2000-01-13
Total Pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9780199728084
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Few authors are so well suited to historical study as Whitman, who is widely considered America's greatest poet. This Guide combines contemporary cultural studies and historical scholarship to illuminate Whitman's diverse contexts. The essays explore dimensions of Whitman's dynamic relationship to working-class politics, race and slavery, sexual mores, the visual arts, and the idea of democracy. The poet who emerges from this volume is no "solitary singer," distanced from his culture, but what he himself called "the age transfigured," fully enmeshed in his times and addressing issues that are still vital today.
Author: Gay Wilson Allen
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 1997
Total Pages: 252
ISBN-13: 9780815604884
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author of the biography of Whitman and several other books about the poet, general coeditor of The Collected Writings, and for 25 years the leading scholar of Leaves of Grass, Allen has now produced a critical guide for an intelligent reader's analysis and evaluation of current interpretations and approaches to Whitman's poetry. Its five sections are concerned with: a) the Whitman man-or-beast myth; 2) the 'long foreground' to the Leaves; 3) the nine editions, 1855-1892, of Whitman's book...; 4) the central themes or subject matter that give it unity, and the views of critics...; and 5) its form and structure as seen in a dozen individual lyrics. The result is a useful, valuable, and even remarkable capstone to a long career devoted to the study of 'A Bible for Democracy' (Whitman's phrase for Leaves of Grass).
Author: Shelley Fisher Fishkin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2002-10-03
Total Pages: 328
ISBN-13: 0199729069
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Mark Twain (born Samuel Clemens), a former printer's apprentice, journalist, steamboat pilot, and miner, remains to this day one of the most enduring and beloved of America's great writers. Combining cultural criticism with historical scholarship, A Historical Guide to Mark Twain addresses a wide range of topics relevant to Twain's work, including religion, commerce, race, gender, social class, and imperialism. Like all of the Historical Guides to American Authors, this volume includes an introduction, a brief biography, a bibliographic essay, and an illustrated chronology of the author's life and times.
Author: J. Gerald Kennedy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2001-01-04
Total Pages: 256
ISBN-13: 0199728135
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), son of itinerant actors, holds a secure place in the firmament of history as America's first master of suspense. Displaying scant interest in native scenes or materials, Edgar Allan Poe seems the most un-American of American writers during the era of literary nationalism; yet he was at the same time a pragmatic magazinist, fully engaged in popular culture and intensely concerned with the "republic of letters" in the United States. This Historical Guide contains an introduction that considers the tensions between Poe's "otherworldly" settings and his historically marked representations of violence, as well as a capsule biography situating Poe in his historical context. The subsequent essays in this book cover such topics as Poe and the American Publishing Industry, Poe's Sensationalism, his relationships to gender constructions, and Poe and American Privacy. The volume also includes a bibliographic essay, a chronology of Poe's life, a bibliography, illustrations, and an index.
Author: John Carlos Rowe
Publisher:
Published: 2012-02-16
Total Pages: 281
ISBN-13: 019512135X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An excellent primer to the work and milieu of Henry James, this collection of essays highlights the historical and cultural issues that influenced the great novelist.
Author: Douglas Field
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009-09-24
Total Pages: 272
ISBN-13: 019045119X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →With contributions from major scholars of African American literature, history, and cultural studies, A Historical Guide to James Baldwin focuses on the four tumultous decades that defined the great author's life and art. Providing a comprehensive examination of Baldwin's varied body of work that includes short stories, novels, and polemical essays, this collection reflects the major events that left an indelible imprint on the iconic writer: civil rights, black nationalism and the struggle for gay rights in the pre- and post-Stonewall eras. The essays also highlight Baldwin's under-studied role as a trans-Atlantic writer, his lifelong struggle with faith, and his use of music, especially the blues, as a key to unlock the mysteries of his identity as an exile, an artist, and a black American in a racially hostile era.
Author: Steven Carl Tracy
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 268
ISBN-13: 9780195144345
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Langston Hughes has been an inspiration to generations of readers and writers seeking a passionate and socially responsible art. In this text, Steven Tracy has gathered a range of critics to produce an interdisciplinary approach to the historical and cultural elements reflected in Hughes's work.
Author: Vivian R. Pollak
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2004-01-29
Total Pages: 312
ISBN-13: 9780199729142
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →One of America's most celebrated women, Emily Dickinson was virtually unpublished in her own time and unknown to the public at large. Yet since the first publication of a limited selection of her poems in 1890, she has emerged as one of the most challenging and rewarding writers of all time. Born into a prosperous family in small town Amherst, Massachusetts, she had an above average education for a woman, attending a private high school and then Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, now Mount Holyoke College. Returning to Amherst to her loving family and her "feast" in the reading line, in the 1850s she became increasingly solitary and after the Civil War she spent her life indoors. Despite her cooking and gardening and extensive correspondence, Dickinson's life was strikingly narrow in its social compass. Not so her mind, and on her death in 1886 her sister discovered an astonishing cache of close to eighteen hundred poems. Bitter family quarrels delayed the full publication of Dickinson's "letter to the World," but today her poetry is commonly anthologized and widely praised for its precision, its intensity, its depth and beauty. Dickinson's life and work, however, remain in important ways mysterious. The essays presented here, all of them previously unpublished, provide an overview of Dickinson studies at the start of the twenty-first century. Written in an engaging and accessible style, this collection represents the best of contemporary scholarship and points the way toward exciting new directions for the future. The volume includes a biographical essay that covers some of the major turning points in the poet's life, especially those emphasized by her letters. Other essays discuss Dickinson's religious beliefs, her response to the Civil War, her class-based politics, her place in a tradition of American women's poetry, and the editing of her manuscripts. A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson concludes with a rich bibliographical essay describing the controversial history of Dickinson's life in print, together with a substantial bibliography of relevant sources.
Author: Carol J. Singley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2003-01-30
Total Pages: 316
ISBN-13: 9780199727339
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Edith Wharton, arguably the most important American female novelist, stands at a particular historical crossroads between sentimental lady writer and modern professional author. Her ability to cope with this collision of Victorian and modern sensibilities makes her work especially interesting. Wharton also writes of American subjects at a time of great social and economic change-Darwinism, urbanization, capitalism, feminism, world war, and eugenics. She not only chronicles these changes in memorable detail, she sets them in perspective through her prodigious knowledge of history, philosophy, and religion. A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton provides scholarly and general readers with historical contexts that illuminate Wharton's life and writing in new, exciting ways. Essays in the volume expand our sense of Wharton as a novelist of manners and demonstrate her engagement with issues of her day.
