Handbook of the American Short Story

Handbook of the American Short Story

Author: Erik Redling

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2022-01-19

Total Pages: 712

ISBN-13: 3110587645

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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.


The Reverend Mark Twain

The Reverend Mark Twain

Author: Joe B. Fulton

Publisher: Ohio State University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0814210244

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"I was made in His image," Mark Twain once said, "but have never been mistaken for Him." God may have made Mark Twain in His image, but Twain frequently remade himself by adopting divine personae as part of his literary burlesque. Readers were delighted, rather than fooled, when Twain adopted the image of religious vocation throughout his writing career: Theologian, Missionary, Priest, Preacher, Prophet, Saint, Brother Twain, Holy Samuel, the Bishop of New Jersey, and of course, the Reverend Mark Twain. Joe B. Fulton has not written a study of Samuel Langhorne Clemens's religious beliefs, but rather one about Twain's use of theological form and content in a number of his works-some well-known, others not so widely read. Twain adopted such religious personae to burlesque the religious literary genres associated with those vocations. He wrote catechisms, prophecies, psalms, and creeds, all in the theological tradition, but with a comic twist. Twain even wrote a burlesque life of Christ that has the son of God sporting blue jeans and cowboy boots. With his distinctive comic genius, Twain entered the religious dialogue of his time, employing the genres of belief as his vehicle for criticizing church and society. Twain's burlesques of religious form and content reveal a writer fully engaged with the religious ferment of his day. Works like The Innocents Abroad, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, Roughing It, and What Is Man? are the productions of a writer skilled at adopting and adapting established literary and religious forms for his own purposes. Twain is sometimes viewed as a haphazard writer, but in The Reverend Mark Twain, Fulton demonstrates how carefully Twain studied established literary and theological genres to entertain-and criticize-his society. Book jacket.


The Reconstruction of Mark Twain

The Reconstruction of Mark Twain

Author: Joe B. Fulton

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2011-01-01

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0807146951

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When Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, thousands of patriotic southerners rushed to enlist for the Confederate cause. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who grew up in the border state of Missouri in a slave-holding family, was among them. Clemens, who later achieved fame as the writer Mark Twain, served as second lieutenant in a Confederate militia, but only for two weeks, leading many to describe his loyalty to the Confederate cause as halfhearted at best. After all, Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and his numerous speeches celebrating Abraham Lincoln, with their trenchant call for racial justice, inspired his crowning as "the Lincoln of our Literature." In The Reconstruction of Mark Twain, Joe B. Fulton challenges these long-held assumptions about Twain's advocacy of the Union cause, arguing that Clemens traveled a long and arduous path, moving from pro-slavery, secession, and the Confederacy to pro-union, and racially enlightened. Scattered and long-neglected texts written by Clemens before, during, and immediately after the Civil War, Fulton shows, tout pro-southern sentiments critical of abolitionists, free blacks, and the North for failing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. These obscure works reveal the dynamic process that reconstructed Twain in parallel with and response to events on American battlefields and in American politics. Beginning with Clemens's youth in Missouri, Fulton tracks the writer's transformation through the turbulent Civil War years as a southern-leaning reporter in Nevada and San Francisco to his raucous burlesques written while he worked as a Washington correspondent during the impeachment crises of 1867--1868. Fulton concludes with the writer's emergence as the country's satirist-in-chief in the postwar era. By explaining the relationship between the author's early pro-southern writings and his later stance as a champion for racial justice throughout the world, Fulton provides a new perspective on Twain's views and on his deep involvement with Civil War politics. A deft blend of biography, history, and literary studies, The Reconstruction of Mark Twain offers a bold new assessment of the work of one of America's most celebrated writers.


The Realist Tradition and Contemporary International Relations

The Realist Tradition and Contemporary International Relations

Author: W. David Clinton

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2007-07

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0807149225

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The tradition in international relations theory known as realism has often been associated with the Cold War. The contributors to this intriguing volume argue, however, that realism remains a profound and relevant perspective on contemporary international politics. They point out that classical realism is based on concepts that were elucidated long before the Cold War began and are not confined by its boundaries. Further, they believe that insights of the realist tradition can provide valuable guidance in our contemporary world. W. David Clinton and ten scholars of foreign policy reexamine the work of thinkers spanning twenty-five centuries who have contributed to the development of realism across the ages. In their essays, the authors consider two key questions: What makes these thinkers "realists"? And how is their work relevant to the modern, post--Cold War world? These essays take a fresh look at such canonical thinkers as Thucydides, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hume, Burke, Carr, Niebuhr, and Morgenthau. Countering the widespread belief that realism has nothing left to offer, this collection demonstrates that continuities remain in the political world -- and that the ideas rooted in realism are too important and too useful to ignore. While there are obvious differences among the political philosophers whose works are considered here, they share a common concern about human limitations and the possible dangerous consequences of ignoring those limitations. Each in his own way, these classic thinkers discuss the need for prudence to counter the ever-present threat of tragedy resulting from our innocent, hopeful, or self-righteous efforts for perfection. These provocative essays demonstrate that though a realist understanding of the nature of international relations is at least as old as Thucydides, it is also as contemporaneous as the most recent headline.


John Hay, Friend of Giants

John Hay, Friend of Giants

Author: Philip McFarland

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2017-03-15

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13: 1442222832

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Now, perhaps, only those enmeshed in 19th-century American history know his name; but when John Hay died in 1905, he was one of the most famous men in the world. And one of the most highly regarded. Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary during the Civil War, thereafter as a popular poet, novelist, newspaper editor, highly esteemed historian and biographer, diplomat, businessman, and secretary of state until his death, Hay enjoyed remarkable success in public and private life. In John Hay, Friend of Giants, Philip McFarland presents both the intimate story of Hay’s relationship with four prominent figures of his age and an insightful history of the United States from the 1850s to the turn of the century. Hay’s life and extraordinary friendships provide a window into the politics, literature, society, and diplomacy of this remarkable era of American expansion.


The Author-cat

The Author-cat

Author: Forrest Glen Robinson

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 0823227871

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Forrest G. Robinson argues that a strong autobiographical impulse infuses the whole of Clemens's fiction. He shows how Clemens wrote out of an enduring need to come to terms with his remembered experiences-not to memorialize the past, but to transform it.Clemens's special curse was guilt. He was unable to forgive himself for the deaths of those closest to him, especially members of his family--from his siblings's death in childhood to the deaths of his own children. Nor could he reconcile himself to his role in the Civil War, his ignominious part in the duel that prompted his departure from Virginia City in 1864, and--worst of all--his sense of moral complicity in the crimes of slavery. Tracing the theme of bad faith in all of Clemens's major writing, but with special attention to the late work, Robinson sheds new light on a tormented moral life, directing attention to what William Dean Howells describes as the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him.


Making Mark Twain Work in the Classroom

Making Mark Twain Work in the Classroom

Author: James S. Leonard

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780822322979

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A collection of articles on Twain's work expressing a broad range of critical perspectives and pedagogical methods, intended to address race, gender and class issues in the classroom.


May Swenson: Collected Poems (LOA #239)

May Swenson: Collected Poems (LOA #239)

Author: May Swenson

Publisher: Library of America

Published: 2013-04-04

Total Pages: 840

ISBN-13: 1598532731

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Often compared to the works of E.E. Cummings and Elizabeth Bishop, these poems are a free-ranging exploration of outer and inner worlds, of nature and the human mind In celebration of the centenary of May Swenson’s birth, The Library of America presents a one-volume edition of all of the poems that Swenson published in her lifetime—from her first collection Another Animal (1954) to the innovative shaped poems of Iconographs (1970) to her final work In Other Words (1987)—as well as a selection of previously uncollected work. The collection reveals the sweeping compass of Swenson’s curiosity: nature poems display her keen observation of wildlife; exuberant and erotic love poems celebrate beauty and passion; place poems record her travels to the American Southwest, France, and Italy and her residence in New York City and Sea Cliff, Long Island; verse “analyses” investigate baseball, wave motion, the DNA molecule, bronco busting, James Bond movies, and the first walk on the moon. Swenson was an inveterate reviser: poems in earlier volumes were frequently reworked for inclusion in later volumes, such as To Mix with Time (1963) and New and Selected Things Taking Place (1978). While preserving the order of publication, this volume presents the author’s final or definitive version. Substantive textual variants and title changes are detailed in the notes to the volume. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.


Huck Finn's America

Huck Finn's America

Author: Andrew Levy

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1439186979

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"A groundbreaking and controversial re-examination of our most beloved classic, Huckleberry Finn, proving that for more than 100 years we have misunderstood Twain's message on race and childhood--and the uncomfortable truths it still holds for modern America"--Provided by publisher.