This supplement of American Writers, the twelfth, is largely concerned with a range of contemporary writers, poets, and novelists, many of whom have won large and enthusiastic audiences for their work, although criticism has yet to catch up with them. The function of these essays is quite simple: to provide introductory criticism that treats the developing career of each writer in the context of his or her life circumstances. While the essays are not necessarily mini-biographies, they all provide key markers in each life, and they suggest ways in which the books ...
Americans in British Literature, 17701832: A Breed Apart
American independence was inevitable by 1780, but British writers spent the several decades following the American Revolution transforming their former colonists into something other than estranged British subjects. Christopher Flynn's engaging and timely book systematically examines for the first time the ways in which British writers depicted America and Americans in the decades immediately following the revolutionary war.
Gothic offers a lucid and accessible introduction to the Gothic genre, tracing the darkly terrific shapes and developments of a transgressive literary practice which has thrived for over two centuries. Fred Botting explores a number of key texts, their origins and writers, and discusses them in the context of their cultural and historical location, their critical reception and their influence.
In this fifteenth volume of American Writers, we offer eighteen articles on American writers of fiction, drama (including film, and poetry; they are all accomplished writers who have displayed many of the virtues, yet none of them has yet been featured in this series. These articles should prove helpful to readers who wish to dig more thoroughly into the work of these writers, so that they can see how each—in his or her own way—has added something of great value to American culture.
Modernism and Democracy: Literary Culture 1900-1930
Anglo-American modernist writing and modern mass democratic states emerged at the same time, during the period of 1900-1930. Yet writers such as T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Ford Madox Ford were notoriously hostile to modern democracies. They often defended, anti-democratic forms of cultural authority. Since the late 1970s, however, our understanding of modernist culture has altered as previously marginalized writers, in particular women such as Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, H. D. and Mina Loy have been reassessed.
