Century Readings in the American Short Story PDF Download

Author: Fred Lewis Pattee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Short stories, American
Languages : en
Pages : 588

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Author: Michael Cocchiarale
Publisher: Salem Press
ISBN: 9781619254251
Category : Short stories, American
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This collection of critical essays on the American short story examines the historical and literary contexts for the development of the genre and includes readings of specific authors and works--

Author: Philip Coleman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319499327
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
This timely volume explores the signal contribution George Saunders has made to the development of the short story form in books ranging from CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) to Tenth of December (2013). The book brings together a team of scholars from around the world to explore topics ranging from Saunders’s treatment of work and religion to biopolitics and the limits of the short story form. It also includes an interview with Saunders specially conducted for the volume, and a preliminary bibliography of his published works and critical responses to an expanding and always exciting creative œuvre. Coinciding with the release of the Saunders’ first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), George Saunders: Critical Essays is the first book-length consideration of a major contemporary author’s work. It is essential reading for anyone interested in twenty-first century fiction.

Author: A. Graham-Bertolini
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780230110908
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Graham-Bertolini provides the first analysis of vigilante women in contemporary American fiction. She develops a dynamic model of vigilante heroines using literary and feminist theory and applies it to important texts to broaden our understanding of how law and culture infringe upon women's rights.

Author: Susan Lohafer
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421429195
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
The short story has been a staple of American literature since the nineteenth century, taught in virtually every high school and consistently popular among adult readers. But what makes a short story unique? In Reading for Storyness, Susan Lohafer, former president of the Society for the Study of the Short Story, argues that there is much more than length separating short stories from novels and other works of fiction. With its close readings of stories by Kate Chopin, Julio Cortázar, Katherine Mansfield, and others, this book challenges assumptions about the short story and effectively redefines the genre in a fresh and original way. In her analysis, Lohafer combines traditional literary theory with a more unconventional mode of research, monitoring the reactions of readers as they progress through a story—to establish a new poetics of the genre. Singling out the phenomenon of "imminent closure" as the genre's defining trait, she then proceeds to identify "preclosure points," or places where a given story could end, in order to access hidden layers of the reading experience. She expertly harnesses this theory of preclosure to explore interactions between pedagogy and theory, formalism and cultural studies, fiction and nonfiction. Returning to the roots of storyness, Lohafer illuminates the intricacies of classic short stories and experimental forms of surreal, postmodern, and minimalist fiction. She also discusses the impact of social constructions, such as gender, on the identification of preclosure points by individual readers. Reading for Storyness combines cognitive science with literary theory to present a compelling argument for the uniqueness of the short story.

Author: Erik Redling
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110585324
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
The American short story has always been characterized by exciting aesthetic innovations and an immense range of topics. This handbook offers students and researchers a comprehensive introduction to the multifaceted genre with a special focus on recent developments due to the rise of new media. Part I provides systematic overviews of significant contexts ranging from historical-political backgrounds, short story theories developed by writers, print and digital culture, to current theoretical approaches and canon formation. Part II consists of 35 paired readings of representative short stories by eminent authors, charting major steps in the evolution of the American short story from its beginnings as an art form in the early nineteenth century up to the digital age. The handbook examines historically, methodologically, and theoretically the coming together of the enduring narrative practice of compression and concision in American literature. It offers fresh and original readings relevant to studying the American short story and shows how the genre performs American culture.

Author: Mary Gaitskill
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 1524749141
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 97

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Book Description
Starting with Bad Behavior in the 1980s, Mary Gaitskill has been writing about gender relations with searing, even prophetic honesty. In This Is Pleasure, she considers our present moment through the lens of a particular #MeToo incident. The effervescent, well-dressed Quin, a successful book editor and fixture on the New York arts scene, has been accused of repeated unforgivable transgressions toward women in his orbit. But are they unforgivable? And who has the right to forgive him? To Quin’s friend Margot, the wrongdoing is less clear. Alternating Quin’s and Margot’s voices and perspectives, Gaitskill creates a nuanced tragicomedy, one that reveals her characters as whole persons—hurtful and hurting, infuriating and touching, and always deeply recognizable. Gaitskill has said that fiction is the only way that she could approach this subject because it is too emotionally faceted to treat in the more rational essay form. Her compliment to her characters—and to her readers—is that they are unvarnished and real. Her belief in our ability to understand them, even when we don’t always admire them, is a gesture of humanity from one of our greatest contemporary writers.

Author: Junot Díaz
Publisher: Mariner Books
ISBN: 9780544582897
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Award-winning and best-selling author Junot Díaz guest edits this year's The Best American Short Stories, the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction.

Author: Danforth Ross
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452912211
Category : Literature
Languages : en
Pages : 49

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Book Description
The American Short Story - American Writers 14 was first published in 1961. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Author: Elizabeth Hardwick
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
It is only in a country where newness and change and brevity of tenure are the common substance of life," wrote Henry James, "that the fact of one's ancestors having lived for a hundred and seventy years in a single spot would become an element of one's morality." Newness and rootedness are the twin poles of Sight-Readings, Elizabeth Hardwick's brilliant new collection of essays. (Her first, Seduction and Betrayal, was nominated for the National Book Award.) Hardwick's focus here is on American writers, at home and abroad, and especially women, as writers and as characters: Edith Wharton, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Katherine Anne Porter, and Joan Didion, among others. In sections on Old New York, Americans Abroad, and Fictions of America, Hardwick considers writers and their landscapes, real and imagined. Her essays on Edith Wharton and Henry James illuminate aspects of their inventions of New York. From there she takes us to the Paris of Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes, into the hermetic world of Boston Transcendentalism, and on to the suburbs of John Cheever, the America of Philip Roth and John Updike, and the restless expanses of Richard Ford and the Prairie poets. Elizabeth Hardwick has achieved a permanent place in American letters for her sharp and elegant criticism. Her essays on American writers are them-selves a work of literature.