In this interdisciplinary work that ranges from the ancients through the Renaissance to the present, Jonathan Hart examines systems, law, theatre, nature, stereotype, otherness, authority, new historicism, deconstruction, feminism, reading, interpretation, poetry, and poetics. The book considers crucial topics and controversies involving the field of Comparative Literature, including subjectivity, Bartolomé de Las Casas, and globalization. Regardless of the period, this towering study assumes that meaning, genre, character, language, and structure are principal matters for debate.
Writers flock to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) each November because it provides a procrastination-busting deadline. But only a fraction of the participants meet their goal. Denise Jaden was part of that fraction, writing first drafts of her two published young adult novels during NaNoWriMo. In Fast Fiction, she shows other writers how to do what she did, step-by-step, writer to writer. Her process starts with a prep period for thinking through plot, theme, characters, and setting. Then Jaden provides day-by-day coaching for the thirty-day drafting period. Finally, her revision tips help writers turn merely workable drafts into compelling and publishable novels.
In the tradition of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, How Fiction Works is a scintillating and searching study of the main elements of fiction, such as narrative, detail, characterization, dialogue, realism, and style. In his first full-length book of criticism, one of the most prominent critics of our time takes the machinery of story-telling apart to ask a series of fundamental questions: What do we mean when we say we 'know' a fictional character? What constitutes a 'telling' detail? When is a metaphor successful? Is realism realistic? Why do most endings of novels disappoint?
In American Poetic Materialism from Whitman to Stevens, Mark Noble examines writers who share the assumption that personhood can be understood as a material event. Through new readings of Whitman, Emerson, Santayana, and Stevens, Noble uncovers a literary history wrestling with the consequences of its own materialism, and asks what this account of shared materiality can tell us about the most profoundly secular models of the modern subject.
This single volume brings together all of Poe's stories and poems, and illuminates the diverse and multifaceted genius of one of the greatest and most influential figures in American literary history.
