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In this book, a gay literary critic evaluates a half-century of fictional works'by, for, and about'homosexual men and situates them in the context of an emerging American gay culture. Reed Woodhouse shows how the best gay fiction of the period, like all good literature, not only reflected but anticipated social changes that were afoot - from the founding of the first enduring gay rights organizations through the Stonewall riots to the ambiguous mainstreaming of homosexuality that continues today.

The American idea,'a blend of the Idea of Progress and a belief in the essential goodness of man, has determined the form of much of our significant literature. Carter treats the response to this idea in most of the major and many of the minor writers of the nineteenth century, including Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, William and Henry James, Mark Twain, Howells, and Henry Adams, and sees the persistence of the idea in the novels of Saul Bellow.'Originally published in 1977.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Anne Rice's fame rests on her supernatural tales, but she is far more than a horror novelist. She goes beyond the genre by changing the classic horror stories into myths, fairy tales, and nightmares in order to explore philosophical questions of life, death, evil, and the meaning of existence. This is the most up-to-date analysis of her work and includes individual chapters on each of her vampire, mummy, and witch novels, including Memnoch the Devil (1995). A perfect companion for students and Anne Rice fans, this study also features a biographical chapter and a chapter which discusses her use of the supernatural, gothic, horror, and fantasy genres.

The tale of Demeter and Persephone, a central myth of Victorian women's culture, is used to interpret the life and work of a 19th-century Maine writer.

Includes index.

Feminist Dialogics examines the structure of four novels (Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, James's The Golden Bowl, Wharton's The House of Mirth and Chopin's The Awakening) through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin's critical framework. The author draws on Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia to show how the interaction of many voices forms the social community of the novel and how the functioning of these voices makes clear statements about the position and fate of women in these specific societies. The novels present dialogic situations in which the women misinterpret their social texts and, therefore, fail to understand their own social power. The four works considered in this study represent the struggle for women's construction of self within a dialogic structure of many competing voices.Bauer introduces and enters into dialogue with other theorists who are concerned with the social implications of reading and interpretation, including Rene Girard, Wolfgang Iser, Sandra Gilbert, and Susan Gubar, as well as other American feminists. The recurring theme in the novels of this study is the exclusion and rivalry of discourse: the competition among characters for authoritative and interpretive power. Each voice in the novel is a thematization of an ideological perspective and, as such, competes for domination. The conspiracy of voices to exclude the female reflects the social reality as well. This work is an important contribution to literary criticism and feminist theory.Dale M. Bauer is Assistant Professor of English at Miami University.

Since the opening of Vassar College in 1865, objections to higher education for women have ranged from charges that females were mentally and physically incapable of learning to the belief that educating women would destroy society. Underlying all arguments was the folk wisdom which declared that women could not live and work together. To counteract such beliefs, women's colleges tried to create a special kind of space and new role models that would allow women to exist for a short time in idyllic (or, at least, idealized) conditions. The debate over women's education, for the good or ill of society, generated a great deal of'print,'including short stories and novels. Shirley Marchalonis guides us through the history of this fiction, its depiction of the complexities of the college experience, and the conflicting attitudes that teetered between fascination and fear, celebration and regret. Using novels, short stories, and some juvenile fiction from 1865 to 1940 - all of it specifically about college'girls'--She examines these ideas, the way they developed over time, and their significance in understanding women's education and women's history. The debate over separate colleges for women continues to this day and can be better understood in the context of this informative and entertaining look at the past.

James Fenimore Cooper's Leather-Stocking tales, published between 1823 and 1841, are generally regarded as America's first major works of fiction. Here, Geoffrey Rans provides not simply a new reading of the five novels that comprise the series but also a new way of reading them.Rans analyzes each of the five novels (The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer) in the order in which they were originally composed, an achronological sequence in terms of the stories they tell. As events in early written novels interact with those in later ones, the reader is compelled to construct political meanings different from Cooper's ideological preferences. This approach effectively precludes reading these works as Natty Bumppo's life story, or as an aspect of Cooper's. Rans presents the series as a text that faithfully reproduces the conflicts Cooper faced, both at the time when he wrote the novels and in the history that the novels contemplate.Cooper emerges as a composer of richly problematical texts for which no aesthetic resolution is possible and in which every idealization, political or poetic, is relentlessly subjected to the gaze of historical reality. The tension between potential and practice, which is apparent in the final two volumes of the tales, is present, Rans contends, from the inception of the series. Because the problems of racism and greed that Cooper addresses remained as unresolved for us as for him, Rans concludes that this reading of the Leather-Stocking tales reinforces both Cooper's central canonical position and his value as an articulator of political conflict.Originally published in 1991.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Description based on print version record.

Description based on print version record.

The aim in this book is to explore and analyze those passages in Thoreau's writings which reveal his varying attitudes toward other persons and toward humanity, which reveal his need for communication and intimate relationships, for some means of reaching beyond the Self, and his varying degrees of success and failure in these domains.

Errata slip inserted.

Enacts and evokes the changes and creative possibilities emerging from contemporary literary technologies (electronic media).Bookend challenges distinctions between prose and poetry as well as between popular and academic culture, embodying a wide array of poetic techniques to argue that form and structure are themselves essential to artistic and cultural meaning. It critiques the current media environs, a hybrid reality in which the individual encounters his or her public and private selves in the midst of a crisis of values. Each of the five anatomies represents both a personal and a local account of where the author finds himself in social and educational terms, and an attempt is made throughout to situate this individual experience against a global imperative.Joe Amato is Assistant Professor of English in the Lewis Department of Humanities at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and author of Symptoms of a Finer Age.

These autobiographies illustrate the emergence of American women from their traditional position of dependence and legal and social inequality. Here are five women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Anna Cora Mowatt, a well-known playwright and popular actress; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a prominent leader of the first women's rights movement; Harriet Jacobs, an escaped slave; Mary Antin, a Russian Jew who emigrated with her family to the United States in the late nineteenth century; and Margaret Sanger, founder of the birth control movement in the United States. An introduction and notes accompany each autobiography.At Carnegie Mellon University, Lois J. Fowler is Professor of English and David H. Fowler is Professor of History.

Offers a complex analysis of the psychodynamic role of shame in Melville's work, with detailed readings of Moby-Dick, Pierre, and'Billy Budd.'This study offers a complex analysis of the psychodynamic role of shame in Melville's work, with detailed readings of Moby-Dick, Pierre, and “Billy Budd.” Its concrete application of the rich analytic framework supplied by the work of such theorists as Heinz Kohut, Léon Wurmser, Silvan Tomkins, and Donald Nathanson implicitly challenges the contemporary reliance on an often abstract poststructuralist model of psychoanalysis. As a paradigmatic, coherent reading of the work of a single author, the book will appeal both to the many scholars interested in Melville's work and to anyone interested in psychoanalytic or psychological approaches to literature.Joseph Adamson is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at McMaster University. He has also written Northrop Frye: A Visionary Life and Wounded Fiction: Modern Poetry and Deconstruction.

Originally published by Anansi in 1971, this attractive new edition of Frye's timeless essays on literature and painting features an introduction by Canadian literature scholar Linda Hutcheon.

Description based on print version record.

The confidence man held a fascination for Melville, Hawthorne, Howells, Johnson J. Hooper, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain. In this study the writers are grouped in such a way as to emphasize certain large-scale cultural patterns of nineteenth-century America. Primary attention is given to the con man character himself and the ways in which he reflects the unique qualities and perceptions of a given writer.Originally published in 1973.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Description based on print version record.

'The first literary biography of a much-neglected American writer, this book explores the multiple tensions at the core of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's life and work. A prolific short story writer and novelist, Freeman (1852-1930) developed a reputation as a local colorist who depicted the peculiarities of her native New England. Yet as Leah Blatt Glasser shows, Freeman was one of the first American authors to write extensively about the relationships women form outside of marriage and motherhood, the role of work in women's lives, the complexity of women's sexuality, and the interior lives of women who rebel rather than conform to patriarchal strictures.''In a Closet Hidden traces Freeman's evolution as a writer, showing how her own inner conflicts repeatedly found expression in her art. As Glasser demonstrates, Freeman's work examined the competing claims of creativity and convention, self-fulfillment and self-sacrifice, spinsterhood and marriage, lesbianism and heterosexuality.'--Jacket.

A fascinating, immensely readable biography of one of the most important radical intellectuals of the twentieth century.C. L. R. James: A Political Biography offers the first sustained account of the life and work of one of the twentieth-century's most important radical intellectuals.C. L. R. James (1901-1989) was born and raised in Trinidad and became one of the most prominent figures to emerge out of the West Indian diaspora. He authored numerous books and essays on Caribbean history, Marxist theory, literary criticism, Western civilization, African politics, Hegelian philosophy, and popular culture. His best known works, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, and Beyond a Boundary are classics of twentieth-century thought. James played an active part in democratic movements in the West Indies and Africa as well as in left-wing and Pan-African campaigns in Britain, the United States, and Trinidad.Kent Worcester is a program director at the Social Science Research Council in New York. He has written extensively on the life and work of C. L. R. James, and is co-editor of Trade Union Politics: American Unions and Economic Change, 1960s-1990s. He serves on the editorial board of New Politics, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy.

Offers a lucidly written analysis of the complex and provocative terrain of lesbian literary and cultural theory.Theorizing lesbian, Kathleen Martindale writes, is like embarking on terra incognita. In this book, Martindale offers her lucidly written analysis as a guide through the complex and provocative terrain of lesbian literary and cultural theory.Using the publication of Adrienne Rich's Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence and the outbreak of the American sex wars as a starting point, Martindale traces the emergence of lesbian postmodernism and how lesbian-feminism changed from a popular to an un/popular culture and from a political vanguard into a cultural neo-avant garde.Martindale analyzes the theoretical implications of “creative” texts such as the graphic art and cultural commentary of Alison Bechdel and Diane DiMassa. She experiments in autobiography by Joan Nestle, and deconstructed lesbian genre fiction by Sarah Schulman to determine how these texts elaborate contemporary theoretical issues. These texts, she argues, are widely available and could be considered as postmodernist rewritings and revisions of the most characteristic and preferred lesbian-feminist modes of cultural expression.Her analysis raises poignant questions about how lesbians read, what they read, and what counts as lesbian theory. She concludes with a discussion of the status of queer pedagogy in academic institutions and what measures need to be taken to promote and safeguard its existence in what are often homophobic educational settings.Kathleen Martindale was co-founder and editor of the Canadian Journal of Feminist Ethics, which was subsequently named Feminist Ethics.

Comparatie intre paradoxism si postmodernism.

There's more than meets the eye in the fiction of the master of the espionage thriller, Robert Ludlum. In a study that examines in depth seventeen of Ludlum's novels, including the latest, The Apocalypse Watch (1995), Macdonald uncovers the serious themes running through the novels: the role of the individual in preserving democracy, the value of competing voices, the failure of educational institutions to preserve ideals, the temptations of power, the importance of personal loyalties in the face of impersonal organizations, and the nature of evil. She shows how Ludlum's novels are valuable in helping us to understand modern paranoia - our fear of conspiracies, terrorism, barbarism, and intolerance. A personal interview granted by Ludlum for this book illuminates the influences on his craft, especially his long experience in the theater, which affects his sense of pacing, characterization, humor, and suspense.

'A contemporary literary views book.'

Includes index.