The specially commissioned essays collected in this volume establish new parameters for both scholarly and classroom discussion of Hawthorne. This Companion provides fresh perspectives on Hawthorne's classic works, and on topics such as Hawthorne's relationship to history, women, politics, and early America. It brings together a team of leading international scholars to offer the most comprehensive introduction available to Hawthorne's work and life.
This volume is the first to collect the critical responses of Steinbeck's generation to his many fiction and nonfiction works, as they appeared from the late 1920s on. The articles trace the record of Steinbeck's progress through the 1930s and go on to reflect his steady series of achievements through the 1960s, including his attainment of the Nobel Prize in 1967. These articles offer at last a means of seeing Steinbeck's writings as they were perceived by his contemporaries, whose task it was first to evaluate and interpret them for an ever-growing readership.
Investigating Dickens' Style - A Collocational Analysis
Investigating Dickens' Style aims to provide new and profound insights into Dickens' language and style through the corpus-based study of collocation. A resource for Dickens' and literary stylistics researchers, the study makes use of the 4.6 million-word Dickens corpus to examine in detail Dickens' linguistic innovation, and offers a nuanced understanding of his use of language to achieve stylistic ends.
The fictional representation of the family has long been regarded as a Dickensian speciality. But while nineteenth-century reviewers praised Dickens as the pre-eminent novelist of the family, any close examination of his novels reveals a remarkable disjunction between his image as the quintessential celebrant of the hearth, and his interest in fractured families. Catherine Waters offers an explanation of this discrepancy through an examination of Dickens's representation of the family in relation to nineteenth-century constructions of class and gender.
Robert McParland's insightful book provides a fascinating account of Dickens's role in shaping America's social and cultural identity in the nineteenth century. The author interestingly outlines the many ways in which American readers engaged with Dickens's works, and the ways in which Dickens's books influenced American ideologies. McParland supplies a wealth of material to substantiate his arguments in this well-written book.
