Hedrick examines London's inner life, primarily as it is revealed in his art, to discover the man concealed beneath the public persona. Although London was wealthy, famous, and one of the last great self-made men in America, Hedrick shows that he was always torn by his troubled relationship to his lower-class origins. He lived in painful awareness of the contradictions between the man's world of the lower classes--at the workplace, on the road, and in prison--and the woman's world of the middle class in which he took refuge. Originally published 1982. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
As a young student and activist for a different social order, Gladys Ambort fell victim to political repression in the Argentina of the 1970s. Denounced by her college professor, she was incarcerated for three years, during part of which she underwent solitary confinement in a small, isolated cell. Solitary is her account of this era of her life, including her battles with alienation, truth, reality and uncertainty. She also describes the ‘nothingness’ to which her captors reduced her, which lingered for decades as she rebuilt her life in exile — sounding a warning to others: ‘Never again’. This first English translation takes the reader inside the mind of a young woman isolated from all she knew. Looks at the psychological and other effects of solitary confinement. A true story of how a seventeen-year-old paid harshly for her progressive beliefs. A valuable addition to the literature of political repression. Reviews 'An extraordinary and moving narrative. I have rarely read something so profound about the suffering in prison and its subsequent consequences.'-- Osvaldo Bayer, Argentinian historian and writer, author of Rebel Patagonia. 'Gladys Ambort’s experience is universal because it fits fundamentally in the category of pains imposed by the oppression which disregards the progress and emancipation of humankind.'-- Fernando Solanas, film director; deputy in Parliament, and former candidate to the Presidency in Argentina. 'Tremendous in the ancient meaning of the word, which is terrible. Its justness and the depth of its reflection grant it a place among the great narrative of detention.'-- François Vitrani, General Director of the House of Latin America, in Paris. 'A peculiar work in many aspects (…) The most surprising is doubtless the place that the author grants to the two weeks which she spends in solitary confinement. This reclusion, which kills her desire to live, opens an unexpected field of reflection to us.'-- Le Monde Diplomatique. 'The message of Gladys Ambort’s book is universal, exempt from political resentment and full of humanism, which allows us to understand loneliness. It is good for the authorities to understand the dimension of the word dignity.'-- Walter Kälin, Professor of Public Law at the University of Bern, and Director of the Swiss Centre of Expertise in Human Rights (SCHR). 'What Gladys Ambort experienced reminds us of the persistence of similar cases in different places in the world and the need to act in defence of human rights with adapted instruments. The number of people who say “NON” to torture and to the attempt to human dignity must increase.'-- Marco Mona, professor and member of the National Commission for the Prevention of Torture, Switzerland. 'Can one collapse inside oneself? Can one have the feeling of not existing anymore, either in other people's opinion, or in one’s own view? … Yes. This is what Gladys Ambort demonstrates, thirty years later, by pulling us in the abyss dug by those who deliberately annihilate others … Did the torturers want to silence Gladys Ambort? She will not grant them this victory.'-- Amnesty International, Swiss Section. Extract ‘The fear caused by nothingness makes sanity explode. The threat of nothingness dominates us. It is stronger than any will, any intention. Nothing subverts our decisions more easily than the impossibility of resisting the threat of nothingness. There is no determination to oppose it, no mental structure against it, no human theory that can withstand it’. (Chapter XXV).
When Jack London died in 1916 at age forty, he was one of the most famous writers of his time. Eighty years later he remains one of the most widely read American authors in the world. The first major critical study of London to appear in a decade, Male Call analyzes the nature of his appeal by closely examining how the struggling young writer sought to promote himself in his early work as a sympathetic, romantic man of letters whose charismatic masculinity could carry more significance than his words themselves. Jonathan Auerbach shows that London's personal identity was not a basis of his literary success, but rather a consequence of it. Unlike previous studies of London that are driven by the author's biography, Male Call examines how London carefully invented a trademark "self" in order to gain access to a rapidly expanding popular magazine and book market that craved authenticity, celebrity, power, and personality. Auerbach demonstrates that only one fact of London's life truly shaped his art: his passionate desire to become a successful author. Whether imagining himself in stories and novels as a white man on trail in the Yukon, a sled dog, a tramp, or a professor; or engaging questions of manhood and mastery in terms of work, race, politics, class, or sexuality, London created a public persona for the purpose of exploiting the conventions of the publishing world and marketplace. Revising critical commonplaces about both Jack London's work and the meaning of "nature" within literary naturalism and turn-of-the-century ideologies of masculinity, Auerbach's analysis intriguingly complicates our view of London and sheds light on our own postmodern preoccupation with celebrity. Male Call will attract readers with an interest in American studies, American literature, gender studies, and cultural studies.
Jack London has long been recognized as one of the most colorful figures in American literature. He is Americas most widely translated author (into more than eighty languages), and although his works have been neglected until recently by academic critics in the United States, he is finally winning recognition as a major figure in American literary history. The breadth and depth of new critical study of Londons work in recent decades attest to his newfound respectability. London criticism has moved beyond a traditional concerns of realism and naturalism as well as beyond the timeworn biographical focus to engage such theoretical approaches as race, gender, class, post-structuralism, and new historicism. The range and intellectual energy of the essays collected here give the reader a new sense of Londons richness and variety, especially his treatment of diverse cultures. Having in the past focused more on Londons personal "world, we are now afforded an opportunity to look more closely at his art and the numerous worlds it uncovers.
Welcome to the Essential Novelists book series, were we present to you the best works of remarkable authors. For this book, the literary critic August Nemo has chosen the two most important and meaningful novels of Mary Augusta Ward wich are Lady Rose's Daughter and The Marriage of William Ashe. Mary Augusta Ward was an English novelist whose best-known work, Robert Elsmere, created a sensation in its day by advocating a Christianity based on social concern rather than theology. Novels selected for this book: - Lady Rose's Daughter. - The Marriage of William Ashe.This is one of many books in the series Essential Novelists. If you liked this book, look for the other titles in the series, we are sure you will like some of the authors.
With his novels, journalism, short stories, political activism, and travel writing, Jack London established himself as one of the most prolific and diverse authors of the twentieth century. Covering London's biography, cultural context, and the various genres in which he wrote, The Oxford Handbook of Jack London is the definitive reference work on the author.
