Short Stories

Love and Death in the American Novel

A retrospective article on Leslie Fiedler in the New York Times Book Review in 1965 referred to Love and Death in the American Novel as " one of the great, essential books on the American imagination . . . an accepted major work." This groundbreaking work views in depth both American literature and character from the time of the American Revolution to the present. From it, there emerges Fiedler's once scandalousnow increasingly acceptedjudgment that our literature is incapable of dealing with adult sexuality and is pathologically obsessed with death.

The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller's Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan (Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures)

Willa Cather and the Fairy Tale (Studies in Modern Literature, No 97)

The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s

How did advertising come to seem natural and ordinary to magazine readers by the end of the nineteenth century? The Adman in the Parlor explores readers' interactions with advertising during a period when not only consumption but advertising itself became established as a pleasure. Garvey argues that readers' participation in advertising, rather than top-down dictation by advertisers, made advertizing a central part of American culture. Garvey's analysis interweaves such texts and artifacts as advertising trade journals, magazines addressed to elite, middle class, and poorer readerships, scrapbooks, medical articles, paper dolls, chromolithographed trade cards, and contest rules. She tracks new forms of fictional realism that contained brand name references, courtship stories, and other fictional forms.

As magazines became dependant on advertising rather than sales for their revenues, women's magazines led the way in making consumers of readers through the interplay of fiction, editorials, and advertising. General magazines, too, saw little conflict between these different interests. Instead, advertising and fiction came to act on one another in complex, unexpected ways. Magazine stories illustrated the multiple desires and social meanings embodied in the purchase of a product. Garvey takes the bicycle as a case study, and tracks how magazines mediated among competing medical, commercial, and feminist discourses to produce an alluring and unthreatening model of women bicycling in their stories.

Advertising formed the national vocabulary. At once invisible, familiar, and intrusive, advertising both shaped fiction of the period and was shaped by it. The Adman in the Parlor unearths the lively conversations among writers and advertisers about the new prevalence of advertising for mass-produced, nationally distributed products.

The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton

Starting with the tensions in the early family constellation, Gloria C. Erlich traces Edith Wharton's erotic evolution--from her early repression of sexuality and her celibate marriage to her discovery of passion in a rapturous midlife love affair with the bisexual Morton Fullerton. Analyzing the novelist's life, letters, and fiction, Erlich reveals several interrelated identity systems--the filial, the sexual, and the creative--that evolved together over the course of Wharton's lifetime.

Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk

As he focuses on works by Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Joseph McElroy, and Don DeLillo, Joseph Tabbi finds that a simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from technology has produced a powerful new mode of modern writing--the technological sublime.

From Fact to Fiction: Journalism & Imaginative Writing in America (Literature/American Studies)

Walt Whitman spent twenty-five years as a journalist before he published his first book of poems. Mark Twain pursued a twenty-year career as a journalist before the publication of his first novel. The list of great imaginative writers whose careers began in journalism includes not only Whitman and Twain, but also Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos, among others.
Fishkin's book--the first full-length study to examine this tradition in American letters--focuses on the lives and careers of Whitman, Twain, Dreiser, Hemingway, and Dos Passos, in order to discover the roots of their greatest imaginative works and the factors that led each writer to turn to fiction. Fishkin determines that they all turned to fiction because they wished to engage their readers in ways not possible through conventional journalism, and yet not one of them found his artistic stride until he returned, in new and creative ways, to the subjects and strategies first explored as a journalist.
Fishkin weaves together threads of biography, literary criticism, literary theory, and social history to reveal the neglected role journalism has played in shaping American literary tradition since the 1830s. Her final chapter examines the attitudes toward journalism and fiction, and the division between the two in the works of such contemporary fiction writers as Norman Mailer, John Hersey, and E.L. Doctorow.
Fishkin's probing examination of the poetry and fiction that followed the newspaper and magazine work of Whitman, Twain, Dreiser, Hemingway, and Dos Passos both reveals how each writer transformed fact into art and how journalism has helped to give a distinctively American cast to American literature.

Women Writers of the Contemporary South (Southern Quarterly Series)

The Past in the Present: A Thematic Study of Modern Southern Fiction (Southern Literary Studies)

Kissing the Mango Tree: Puerto Rican Women Rewriting American Literature

A thorough examination of the work of popular Puerto Rican women writers

Pioneering novelist and short-story writer Nicholasa Mohr broke onto the literary scene of ethnic autobiography in the early 1970s, but it took another decade for another Nuyorican (New York Puerto Ricans writing in English) women to follow the path that she cut. From the late 1970's on, a dynamic group of these writers have expanded the landscape of American literature.

Kissing the Mango Tree is the first and only book to examine the works of the most popular Puerto Rican women writers from the perspective of feminist literary criticism. Rivera reconstructs the ethno-feminist aesthetic of Judith Ortiz Cofer, San María Esteves, Nicholasa Mohr, Aurora Levins Morales, Rosario Morales, Esmeralda Santiago, and Luz María Umpierre-Herrera.

In separate chapters dedicated to each of these writers, the author locates their works within the framework of feminist theory and literature, seeing them as "women with macho asserting their creative powers to record their own versions of their memories, to own their own bodies... They transform the way we look at the process of growing up and becoming a woman, at the relationship with our mothers and our daughters, at the fluidity of our lives, at our notions of nationhood..."