Edward Gibbon's presentation of character in both the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and in his posthumously published Memoirs demonstrates a prevailing interest in the values of transcendent heroism and individual liberty, but also an insistent awareness of the dangers these values pose to coherence and narrative order.
Advertisements for Myself, a diverse and freewheeling tour through Mailer's early career, covers the many subjects with which he'd grapple for the rest of his life: sex, race, politics, literature, and the systems of power that shape American life.
First published in 1968, this book sets out to refute the idea of Trollope as a 'mild cathedral-town novelist, describing storms in ecclesiastical tea cups' which prevailed at the time in spite of his stature during his lifetime.
In 1989, Steven Moore published the first scholarly study of all three of William Gaddis's novels and since then it has been generally regarded as the best book on this difficult but major writer's work.
This book explores the concept of 'quiet' - an aesthetic of narrative driven by reflective principles - and argues for the term's application to the study of contemporary American fiction.
Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth argues that Roth's novels teach us that Jewish anxiety stems not only from fear of victimization but also from fear of perpetration.
Despite the great diversity of settings in Tanith Lee's novels--from the pre-historic origins of Christianity to robot-dominated futurescapes--certain underlying thoughts and references appear consistently.
America's post-World War II prosperity created a boom in higher education, expanding the number of university-educated readers and making a new literary politics possible.
1919, Revolution in München – und alle sind vor Ort: Ernst Toller, Thomas Mann, Erich Mühsam, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gustav Landauer, Oskar Maria Graf, Viktor Klemperer, Klaus Mann .
Offering a world full of traumatized characters trapped in a consumerist society where men, women, sex and gender have become unstable commodities, Chuck Palahniuk has become one of the most controversial of contemporary novelists.
Since Superman first appeared on the cover of Action Comics #1 in 1938, the superhero has changed with the times to remain a relevant icon of American popular culture.
This ethnographic study focuses on the religious imagery and practices of a sample of Buddhist temples and Muslim mosques in the greater Los Angeles area.
Magic, and especially performance magic, has been a part of crime fiction since its inception: both art forms surged in popularity in Western Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century and influenced each other in profound ways.
In the fourth and final volume of the Memory Ireland series, Frawley and O'Callaghan explore the manifestations and values of cultural memory in Joyce's Ireland, both real and imagined.
This book provides a concise and highly readable reassessment of Iris Murdoch's engagement with philosophy throughout her life and proposes that she was, most importantly, a philosophical novelist.
The American Villain: Encyclopedia of Bad Guys in Comics, Film, and Television provides one go-to reference for the study of the most popular and iconic villains in American popular culture.
Interviews from the Edge presents a selection of conversations, drawn from 50 years of the international journal New Orleans Review, that dive head-first into the most enduring aesthetic and social concerns of the last half century.
This study examines a selection of Chesterton's novels, poetry, and literary criticism and outlines the distinctive philosophy of history that emerges from these writings.
Biofiction is literature that names its protagonist after an actual historical figure, and it has become a dominant literary form over the last 35 years.