Search results for "David Maine"
Items we need to order for you
Certain Slant of Light
In A Certain Slant of Light, David Marion Holman examines two prolific regional American literatures, those of the South and the Midwest, from about 1832 to 1925. By focusing on the role history played in the imaginations of selected writers of that period, he seeks to answer a perennial question: What is ""midwestern"" about midwestern literature, and what is ""southern"" about southern literature?At least until 1910, Holman says, the fiction of the two regions was characterized by two very different modes, romance in the South and social realism in the Midwest. He explains that writers in the two regions responded to, often reacted against, mythologies of the American past that were diametrically opposed. For the southerner, the past was the plantation, the aristocrat, and the Civil War. It could be both heritage and trap, as exemplified in the works of William Gilmore Simms, John Pendleton Kennedy, John Esten Cooke, Thomas Nelson Page, and George Washington Cable. Even in writing about the present, the southern writer, Holman maintains, had to confront, directly or indirectly, the ghosts of the past, ghosts that could be exorcised, vilified, or romanticized, but never ignored.For the midwestern writer, the past was the pioneer and the settling of the frontier, a past of promise unfulfilled and unattained. The midwestern myth at once glorified the common man as the promise of America and deplored him as venal and narrow-minded. The promise of the frontier past and its perversion in the present had to be confronted, and from the mid-1800s to 1900 the dominant literary mode of this confrontation was realism, as seen in the work of Caroline Kirkland, Edward Eggleston, Edgar Watson Howe, Hamlin Garland, and Joseph Kirkland.After the turn of the century, according to Holman, Ellen Glasgow in the South and Willa Cather in the Midwest began to break the mold of their respective regional traditions, their movements almost inversions of each other. By 1925 modernism had become a major force in American letters, providing the next generation of writers, perhaps best represented by Hemingway in the Midwest and Faulkner in the South, with new ways of confronting old ideologies, and these writers synthesized many of the premises of romance and realism. Ultimately the literatures of the two regions shared the goal of bringing past and present together into a meaningful and understandable relationship.What emerges from Holman's unique study is solid documentation of a genuinely creative divergence in the literary imaginations of two kinds of American writing, each of which resulted in some of the most distinguished literature of the twentieth century.
R 1,283.00
Main Currents in American Thought
When Parrington's Pulitzer Prize-winning history of American ideas was first published, Henry Seidel Canby wrote, "This is a work of the first importance, lucid, comprehensive, accurate as sound scholarship should be, and also challenging, original in its thinking, shrewd, and sometimes brilliant." Alfred Kazin has called Main Currents in American Thought "the most ambitious single effort of the Progressive mind to understand itself." In the Foreword to this new edition, David W. Levy argues that Parrington's intellectual survey "will stand as a model for venturesome scholars for years to come. Readers and scholars of the rising generation may not follow Parrington's particular judgments or point of view, but it is hard to believe that they will not still be captivated and inspired by his sparkle, his breadth, his daring, and the ardor of his political commitment." Volume I, The Colonial Mind, 1620-1800, treats such influential figures as John Winthrop, Roger Williams, Samuel Sewall, Increase and Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Tom Paine, and Thomas Jefferson.
R 970.00
Manhood and the American Renaissance
In the view of David Leverenz, such nineteenth-century American male writers as Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman were influenced more profoundly by the popular model of the entrepreneurial "man of force" than they were by their literary precursors and contemporaries. Drawing on the insights of feminist theory, gender studies, psychoanalytical criticism, and social history, Manhood and the American Renaissance demonstrates that gender pressures and class conflicts played as critical a role in literary creation for the male writers of nineteenth-century America as they did for the women writers. Leverenz interprets male American authors in terms of three major ideologies of manhood linked to the social classes in the Northeast-patrician, artisan, and entrepreneurial. He asserts that the older ideologies of patrician gentility and of artisan independence were being challenged from 1820 to 1860 by the new middle-class ideology of competitive individualism. The male writers of the American Renaissance, patrician almost without exception in their backgrounds and self-expectations, were fascinated yet horrified by the aggressive materialism and the rivalry for dominance they witnessed in the undeferential "new men." In close readings of the works both of well-known male literary figures and of then popular authors such as Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and Francis Parkman, Leverenz discovers a repressed center of manhood beset by fears of humiliation and masochistic fantasies. He discerns different patterns in the works of Whitman, with his artisan's background, and Frederick Douglass, who rose from artisan freedom to entrepreneurial power. Emphasizing the interplay of class and gender, Leverenz also considers how women viewed manhood. He concludes that male writers portrayed manhood as a rivalry for dominance, but contemporary female writers saw it as patriarchy. Two chapters contrast the work of the genteel writers Sarah Hale and Caroline Kirkland with the evangelical works of Susan Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe. A bold and imaginative work, Manhood and the American Renaissance will enlighten and inspire controversy among all students of American literature, nineteenth-century American history, and the relation of gender and literature.
R 1,735.00
David Foster Wallace and the Question of Scepticism
David Foster Wallace and the Question of Scepticism examines the role of scepticism and doubt in Wallace's work, showing that they are of fundamental importance to his writing in its form and its themes. Wallace's work articulates a deep ambivalence about the value of scepticism, on the one hand presenting practical and moral arguments for the value of conviction and belief, while on the other hand being committed to a sceptical project of opposing certainty and dogma. On a formal level, Wallace's writing both solicits the reader's trust and provokes the reader's scepticism. This dynamic is responsible for the polarised responses of absolute trust and dissenting scepticism that characterise the work's reception. By putting these responses into dialogue with the work's internal treatment of the question of scepticism, this book illuminates the core philosophical investments that drive the work, and the dynamics that have so far governed its reception.
R 5,027.00
On the Divide
Willa Cather’s fiction frequently plays out on “the divide,” the high prairie land of Nebraska, where the author herself lived as a child. This book suggests that Cather’s own life played out on a divide as well, deliberately measured out between different roles and personae that made their way into her writing. On the Divide analyzes the iconic image that Cather helped develop for herself, in contrast to the anonymous face she adopted for promotional activities and the very different private self she shared only with friends and family. Delving into Cather’s correspondence and the little-known promotional material she produced anonymously, David Porter provides new insight into the extent—and direction—of her control. He also considers the contrasting influences of Mary Baker Eddy, whose biography Cather ghostwrote, and Sarah Orne Jewett on the author’s emerging artistic persona. The study goes on to explore the many ways in which these “divides” in Cather’s life found expression in her writing. Extending from Cather’s early stories to her final novel, Porter’s book documents the degree to which Cather’s understanding of her own different and often conflicting sides, and of her penchant for playing diverse roles, enabled her as a novelist to create characters so torn, so complex, and so profoundly human.
R 1,098.00
On the Divide
Willa Cather’s fiction frequently plays out on “the divide,” the high prairie land of Nebraska, where the author herself lived as a child. This book suggests that Cather’s own life played out on a divide as well, deliberately measured out between different roles and personae that made their way into her writing. On the Divide analyzes the iconic image that Cather helped develop for herself, in contrast to the anonymous face she adopted for promotional activities and the very different private self she shared only with friends and family. Delving into Cather’s correspondence and the little-known promotional material she produced anonymously, David Porter provides new insight into the extent—and direction—of her control. He also considers the contrasting influences of Mary Baker Eddy, whose biography Cather ghostwrote, and Sarah Orne Jewett on the author’s emerging artistic persona. The study goes on to explore the many ways in which these “divides” in Cather’s life found expression in her writing. Extending from Cather’s early stories to her final novel, Porter’s book documents the degree to which Cather’s understanding of her own different and often conflicting sides, and of her penchant for playing diverse roles, enabled her as a novelist to create characters so torn, so complex, and so profoundly human.
R 1,098.00
David Foster Wallace in Context
David Foster Wallace is regarded as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book introduces readers to the literary, philosophical and political contexts of Wallace's work. An accessible and useable resource, this volume conceptualizes his work within long-standing critical traditions and with a new awareness of his importance for American literary studies. It shows the range of issues and contexts that inform the work and reading of David Foster Wallace, connecting his writing to diverse ideas, periods and themes. Essays cover topics on gender, sex, violence, race, philosophy, poetry and geography, among many others, guiding new and long-standing readers in understanding the work and influence of this important writer.
R 4,575.61
David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form
In David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form, David Hering analyses the structures of David Foster Wallace's fiction, from his debut The Broom of the System to his final unfinished novel The Pale King. Incorporating extensive analysis of Wallace's drafts, notes and letters, and taking account of the rapidly expanding field of Wallace scholarship, this book argues that the form of Wallace’s fiction is always inextricably bound up within an ongoing conflict between the monologic and the dialogic, one strongly connected with Wallace’s sense of his own authorial presence and identity in the work. Hering suggests that this conflict occurs at the level of both subject and composition, analysing the importance of a number of provocative structural and critical contexts – ghostliness, institutionality, reflection – to the fiction while describing how this argument is also visible within the development of Wallace’s manuscripts, comparing early drafts with published material to offer a career-long framework of the construction of Wallace’s fiction. The final chapter offers an unprecedentedly detailed analysis of the troubled, decade-long construction of the work that became The Pale King.
R 5,150.00
David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form
In David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form, David Hering analyses the structures of David Foster Wallace's fiction, from his debut The Broom of the System to his final unfinished novel The Pale King. Incorporating extensive analysis of Wallace's drafts, notes and letters, and taking account of the rapidly expanding field of Wallace scholarship, this book argues that the form of Wallace’s fiction is always inextricably bound up within an ongoing conflict between the monologic and the dialogic, one strongly connected with Wallace’s sense of his own authorial presence and identity in the work. Hering suggests that this conflict occurs at the level of both subject and composition, analysing the importance of a number of provocative structural and critical contexts – ghostliness, institutionality, reflection – to the fiction while describing how this argument is also visible within the development of Wallace’s manuscripts, comparing early drafts with published material to offer a career-long framework of the construction of Wallace’s fiction. The final chapter offers an unprecedentedly detailed analysis of the troubled, decade-long construction of the work that became The Pale King.
R 1,117.00
