Literary Criticism : American

The first systematic analysis of American literature textbooks used by college instructors in the last century. Scholars have long noted the role that college literary anthologies play in the rising and falling reputations of American authors. Canons by Consensus examines this classroom fixture in detail to challenge and correct a number of assumptions about the development of the literary canon throughout the 20th century. Joseph Csicsila analyzes more than 80 anthologies published since 1919 and traces not only the critical fortunes of individual authors, but also the treatment of entire genres and groupings of authors by race, region, gender, and formal approach. In doing so, he calls into question accusations of deliberate or inadvertent sexism and racism. Selections by anthology editors, Csicsila demonstrates, have always been governed far more by prevailing trends in academic criticism than by personal bias. Academic anthologies are found to constitute a rich and often overlooked resource for studying American literature, as well as an irrefutable record of the academy's changing literary tastes throughout the last century. "[This] is an innovative piece of scholarship—provocative by implication, lucid in presentation, steady in judgment. What the author has done is to methodically drill test bores through strata of representations of American literature. . . . No one in the future ought to be able to make overarching claims about the American literary canon without first checking here the facts of the cases in question."—from the Foreword by Tom Quirk Joseph Csicsila is Assistant Professor of English at Eastern Michigan University where he was recognized with the 2002 Ronald W. Collins Distinguished Faculty Award for Teaching. Tom Quirk is Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia and the author of Nothing Abstract: Investigations in the American Literary Imagination. more...

Price: $30.80

Part of a scholarship that seeks to undo Willa Cather's longstanding reputation as a writer who remained aloof from the cultural issues of her day, this chronologically arranged collection demonstrates that Cather found the subject of war both unavoidable, because of her position in history, and artistically irresistible. more...

Price: $35.00

More than a decade after its initial publication, the groundbreaking anthology Charlie Chan Is Dead remains the best available source for contemporary Asian American fiction. Edited by acclaimed novelist and National Book Award nominee Jessica Hagedorn, Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home in the World brings together forty-two fresh, fascinating voices in Asian American writing—from classics by Jose Garcia Villa and Wakako Yamauchi to exciting new fiction from Akhil Sharma, Ruth Ozeki, Chang-Rae Lee, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Monique Truong. Sweeping in background and literary style, from pioneering writers to newly emerging voices from the Hmong and Korean communities, these exceptional works celebrate the full spectrum of Asian American experience and identities, transcending stereotypes and revealing the strength and vitality of Asian America today. more...

Price: $20.00

An important examination of Charles Chesnutt as a practitioner of realism. With the release of previously unpublished novels and a recent proliferation of critical studies on his life and work, Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932) has emerged as a major American writer of his time—the age of Howells, Twain, and Wharton. In Chesnutt and Realism, Ryan Simmons breaks new ground by theorizing how understandings of literary realism have shaped, and can continue to shape, the reception of Chesnutt’s work. Although Chesnutt is typically acknowledged as the most prominent African American writer of the realist period, little attention has been paid to the central question of this study: what does it mean to call Chesnutt a realist? A writer whose career was circumscribed by the dismal racial politics of his era, Chesnutt refused to conform to literary conventions for depicting race. Nor did he use his imaginative skills to evade the realities he and other African Americans faced. Rather, he experimented with ways of portraying reality that could elicit an appropriate, proportionate response to it, as Simmons demonstrates in extended readings of each of Chestnutt’s novels, including important unpublished works that have been overlooked by previous critics. Chesnutt and Realism also addresses a curiously neglected subject in American literary studies—the relationship between American literary realism and race. By taking Chesnutt seriously as a contributor to realism, this book articulates the strategies by which one African American intellectual helped to define the discourses that influenced his fate. Ryan Simmons is Assistant Professor of English at Utah Valley State College more...

Price: $31.96

More than just a gimmick, the collaborative novels of writers such as Mark Twain, Henry James and William Dean Howells, during the period 1870-1920, were a serious attempt to work through the anxieties authors faced in an ever more competitive and businesslike market. more...

Price: $100.00