Subject Guide: Literature

Offers a provocative look at some of Western civilization's most infamous authors and their literary works and shows how these works have inflicted great evil in the world and still cause suffering.

Explores why a novel succeeds (or doesn't), and how the novel has changed over time.

Includes 100 selected books and extensive lists of books to meet special needs and interests as well as classics, selected by age.

Contains 100 of the greatest poems written by 48 women in English over the past 150 years.

Entries range from environmental writer Edward Abbey to investigative reporter/biographer Bob Woodward.

Descriptions of 500 books based upon interviews with teenagers and divided into 22 topics.

Comprehensive list of mood-altering stories

Examines 19th-century social, political, and representational literacies and reading practices to reveal how Black women's complex and confrontational commentary often expressed directly in their journalistic prose and organizational involvement.

Examines six 1990s novels and two post-9/11 novels that explore the impact of the end of the Cold War

Describes the full measure of Auden's influence on American poetry.

Traces the extensive and complex engagement with the past that characterized the imaginative writing of the 1930s.

Includes 1,300 biographies mostly from the U.S.

Uses American classic stories to define classic literature.

Considers the life and work of Elizabeth Stoddard and her current marginal status in the evolving canon of American literary studies.

Information on 225 "ethnic" writers of the U.S.

Examines the writings of F.Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, and Gertrude Stein to show that this period brought a focus on shifting morals, searches for solid identities and the inevitable tensions caused by the economic decline and the rift between the old and the new.

Reads the rich body of 1990s American fiction in the context of key cultural concerns of the period.

Introduction to American literature and culture that addresses four common conceptions of the United States: that it is big, rich, new, and free.

Situates American literature from the Great Depression to the present day in its historical context.

Places major literary works within the context of the topics that engaged a great number of American writers from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Great Depression.

Discusses the issues and events that engaged American writers who lived between 1600 and 1865, providing original and useful readings of important literary works that demonstrate how context contributes to meaning.

Includes biographical and critical entries for over 120 American Realistic and Naturalistic novelists, including Henry Adams, Sherwood Anderson, Saul Bellow, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Jack London.

Explores issues of identity, history, family, nation, and aesthetics, as well as cultural movements and narrative strategies from over 70 different American authors and novels since 1980.

Contains 80 profiles of American novelists.

Re-evaluates the role of the past in recent American fiction, outlines the development of the postmodernist historical novel, and considers the waning influence of postmodernism in contemporary American literature.

Presents essays on the significance of sports fiction in American society and culture.

Presents career biographies and criticism of American travel writers between 1776 and 1864.

Spans from colonial days to the present.

Information about American women writers.

Contains essays on 35 male and female writers of diverse ethnic backgrounds.

A resource of 35 male and female American writers of diverse ethnic backgrounds.

Explores the political and cultural influences that helped shape Edith Wharton and discusses ideas expressed in her writings.

Addresses Suzanne Collins's work from a number of literary and cultural perspectives in an effort to better understand both its significance and its appeal.

Guide to nearly 800 award-winning historical fiction for Kindergarten through 8th grade will assist all parties in the selection of high quality literature.

Presents a wide-ranging look at how whiteness-defined in terms of race or ethnicity-forms a category toward which people strive in order to gain power and privilege.

Constructs a tradition of American women's writing that is multiple and inclusive and that brings together women's voices from across a broad spectrum of U.S. social life.

Analyses of literary texts and historical sources to show how a culture return to peace after a war.

Contains 500 entries of books that are interesting and motivating for young male readers.

Reading guide and selection tool for 12,000 fiction and nonfiction teen titles published from 2001 to 2003

Covers over 14,000 titles of some classics, but mostly published between late 1999 and 2003.

The former editor and senior editor of Poetry magazine tells the story of the last half-century of the magazine's leadership in the publication of American poetry through correspondence with a myriad of poets.

Shows how particular landmark books took on the hot-button subjects of the 1950s and how literature shaped today's American culture.

Uses diverse authors to show how the wit, wisdom, and enchantment of the written word can inform and enrich nearly every aspect of life, from education and work to love and death.

An eight-state literary tour of great writers from the Midwest of the U.S. and famous places associated with them.

Each entry provides a definition of the genre, an overview of its history, a look at trends and themes, a discussion of how the literary form engages contemporary issues, a review of the genre's reception, a discussion of authors and works, and suggestions for further reading.

Exploring children's classics from many eras and relating them to the authors who wrote them.

Proposes new theoretical frameworks for understanding the contradictory ways masculinity is represented in popular texts consumed by boys in the United States.

Argues that humanists need to revive the liberal arts as a progressive cultural force that offers workable ideas and inspiration in the real-world struggle to achieve social and environmental justice.

A portrait of the diverse literary cultures of the city from its beginnings as a Dutch colony to the present.

Explains the very significant pleasures of reading modernist novels and demonstrates how and why reading modernist fiction can be difficult through the writings of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, and Djuna Barnes.

Presents new historical perspectives and critical approaches to the classic authors and texts of English literature produced in the late 17th and 18th centuries.

Takes readers through modernism's most famous poems and some of its forgotten highlights to show why modernists thought difficulty and disorientation essential for poetry in the modern world.

Uses an eclectic collection of cultural, literary, and cinematic texts that represent cannibalism to call into question the comforting national narrative of e pluribus unum.

Looks at children's and young adult book awards in depth.

Provides high quality critical material on a selection of important classic and contemporary children's books.

Demonstrates that American writers have consistently tied the subject of national identity to the that the novel of manners is a dominant form of American fiction.

Offers the intellectual history of early southern American women.

Surveys the history of poetics and provides an introduction and brief biography for each reading.

Introduces nearly 90 of the world's most entertaining classic books.

Covers American literature from the beginnings to the Revolutionary War.

Examines the connections between American philosophy and often-neglected works of literature.

Brings together elements of modernist culture, contemporary intellectual and aesthetic movements, and all the genres of modernist writing and art.

Provides a comprehensive treatment of the development of the novel in the United States from its emergence in the 18th century to the present.

Comprehensive study of the modern American novel.

Guide to the creative output of the U.S. in the postwar period after the Vietnam War.

Contains over 2,000 brief biographies of important authors, plot summaries of individual works, and descriptions of important literary movements from the Colonial period to the modern era.

Tells of the unique and influential friendship in action between Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, of the lives they led, and their influential works.

Uses the study of the writings of men and women in the 17th century to argues that theoretical exclusion of women from the political sphere shaped their relation to it.

Contains arranged entries on nearly 70 American women poets who published significant works after WWII.

Profiles of 50 modern Southern writers of essays, poems, drama, and novels.

Represents a collaborative effort, involving 300 contributors from across the US and Canada.

Included 1,100 biographical-critical entries and 100 topical articles, written by some 150 contributors, covering 150 years of children's literature in many cultures

Covers poetry from over 40 countries and the history of poetry from antiquity to the 21st century.

Offers young adult readers a way to appreciate the lives and works of this special group of fiction writers.

Reexamines the fiction of the great 20th century American author from the interdisciplinary perspective of sociobiology.

Comprehensive biography that uses extensive theater and film archives to reveal in detail Mamet's ideas on writing, acting, and directing.

Collection of conversations regarding the development and future of the literary canon.

Argue that the democratic ideal and practice of equality are grounded less in government documents written by a handful of white men than in the actions and writings of the radical abolitionists of the 19th century.

Covers characters in novels published from 1789 through 2000.

The reading habits, intellectual development, and contributions of the cultural giants of the 20th century are traced.

Examines various approaches to young adult historical fiction.

Celebrates one of the most influential authors and artists of the 20th century: Theodor Seuss Geisel, best known as "Dr. Seuss."

John Updike's 6th collection of literary biographies and essays on various topics.

Argues that a more accurate picture of Edith Wharton's appreciation of American culture and democracy develops through less engagement with controversial views about native Americans.

Examines the way pivotal 20th century critics have understood and deployed Emerson as part of their own larger projects aimed at reconceiving America.

Comparative study in transatlantic Romanticism, focusing on Emerson's part in the American dialogue with British Romanticism and, as filtered through Coleridge, German Idealist philosophy.

Comprehensive coverage of American literature from the Colonial period through 2007.

Covers contemporary authors and works that have enjoyed commercial success in the United States but are typically neglected by more "literary" guides.

Guide to the history and development of feminist literature, from early fairy tales to works by great women writers of today.

Focuses on English-language literary modernism and the period 1890-1939 along with important precursors and successors of the movement.

Comprehensive information about the literary works, writers, and concepts of literature from approximately 1500 to 1660 CE in Europe, China, India, Japan, the Islamic world, and the Jewish diaspora, the New World, Africa, and Oceania.

Offers a comprehensive guide to the novel's genesis, plot, background, themes, style, and critical reception.

Highlights Wayne Booth's contributions to literary and rhetorical studies.

Investigates the claims made by Dan Brown in his novel, The Da Vinci Code, and provides quick, straightforward answers to the most troubling aspects of the popular novel and major motion picture

Demonstrates how playwrights who wrote in expressionism were responding both to new communications technologies and to the perceived threat they posed to the embodied act of meaning.

Explores the relationship and interplay between jazz and 20th-century American literature.

Explores the relationship between the smaller units of construction in a literary work and the work's larger themes in William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and other Southern writers.

Provides an overview of popular feminist fiction from the late 1960s to the end of the 1990s, looking at how key feminist texts influenced popular contemporary works.

Companion for literature surveys of feminist critical and theoretical texts from over 100 writers and scholars are featured.

Excerpts more than 200 feminist primary source documents from Africa to Asia to the Americas to Australia.

Explores the cultural bearings of literary modernism across multiple fields, geographies, symbolic forms, and media.

Contains brief biographical sketches, reviews of major themes, and criticism and selected bibliographical lists of works by and about 50 Western U.S. writers

Explores the impact of the war on writers including Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass.

Examines the relationship between modernist and postmodernist 20th century American poetics.

Recaptures the imaginative exchange between real-life reporters and fictitious journalists in novels.

Each entry of an American writer is situated into biographical, historical, literary, and critical contexts and includes a list of the significant historical figures active at the same time.

Examines southern women writers and explores the craft of writing while tracing her own development from rebellious college student to award-winning author of 19 books.

Tells the story behind the creator and sustainer of the Nancy Drew series.

Offers a reassessment of the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand and examines her life, her ideas, and her impact on conservative political thought.

Examines the works by Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound in light of World War 1.

Includes over 900 alphabetically arranged entries of American poets and poetry from the colonial era to the present, devoting special attention to contemporary poets and their works.

Presents biographies and thematic entries on American writers selected because of their ethnicity.

Contends that the authors of such books as The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and The Sound and the Fury were greatly influenced by World War 1.

Explores how character, courage, and human and moral understanding can be fostered by reflecting on the lives of others, through stories.

Follows the creation and development of the Hardy Boys series through 1979.

Provides scholarly and general readers with historical contexts that illuminate Wharton's life.

Reveals how Fitzgerald's work both illumines and challenges conceptions of his milieu and documents the depth and breadth of Fitzgerald's thinking.

Traces the emergence of modern American poetry at the turn of the 19th century.

Practical and amusing guide to literature that unlocks hidden truths and discovers the world of the works.

Examines humorous young adult literature in light of adolescent developmental issues and theories of comedy.

Analyzes the history of Western ideology from its pre-Enlightenment roots to its current incarnations.

Explores the concept and practice of improvisation in literary modernism and The interconnections between American literature and music.

Discusses the author's three heretofore unpublished Ellmann Lectures from 2010 which speculates about masks, capes, weakling alter egos, follows her into Victorian otherlands and beyond, and investigates Utopias and Dystopias.

Discusses the works of three female American poets: Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), and Amy Clampitt (1920-1994).

Examines how Williams's confessional style and subject matter influenced a diverse group of American playwrights over the past six decades.

Explores the literary dialectic that began with the 1848 publication of Charlotte Bront and novels by American writers that were direct or indirect reactions to it.

Shows how the jazz of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker fit into the great tradition of the modern arts and literature between 1920 and 1950.

Gathers essays from various perspectives, including aesthetic, feminist, ethical, and comparative, in honor of a young scholar dedicated to Steinbeck studies.

Comprehensive history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000.

Provides an overview of the main themes, issues, and critical perspectives that have had the greatest effect on postcolonial literatures.

Explores the marginalization of children's literature in America.

Uses previously unpublished letters by women writers to explore the act and art of writing from diverse perspectives and experiences.

Historic overview of radical and progressive writers, illustrators, editors, librarians, booksellers, and teachers who cooperated to create and disseminate children's books that challenged the status quo.

Reveals which books and authors have shaped the author's life—from classic works of English literature to hard-boiled detective novels, and everything in between.

Suggested books for young men as aids in navigating adolescence, pleasure (or free reading assignment) reading, and tools to improve literacy.

Tracks the evolution of Modernism from its emergence in the late 19th century to its recent incarnations.

Gives analysis and criticism on recent novels and other works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry.

Gives analysis and criticism on recent novels and other works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry.

Helps those researching the American Realism and Naturalism literary period lasted from roughly 1861 to 1914.

Invite residents and out-of-state visitors to explore North Carolina while reading literature from our state's finest writers, including O. Henry and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Charts the history and confluence of literature and film.

A survey of the interaction between science and Anglo-American literature from the late medieval period to the 20th century, examining how authors, thinkers, and philosophers have viewed science in literary texts, and used science as a window to the future.

Examines eight contemporary novels from eight cultures.

Profiles the censorship of many essential works of literature.

Covers a wide range of films adapted from a variety of sources, including classic and popular literature, drama, biography, and memoir.

Provides biography and critical analysis of major U.S. and Canadian authors of fiction, darama, nonfiction and poetry.

Chronological survey of major influences on T.S. Eliot's worldview that covers the poet's spiritual and intellectual evolution in stages.

Demonstrates that beginning in the 1850s, women writers challenged Scottish Common Sense philosophy which had subordinated aesthetic motivation to moral and educational goals.

Interdisciplinary study of the Civil War and its enduring impact on American writers and filmmakers.

Tells how 30 popular writers were influenced to write.

Compares modern literary treatments of "end of the world" stories and charts an ultimate battle between good and evil that destroys previous social structures and rings in a lasting new order.

History of the visionaries--editors, illustrators, and others--whose books have transformed American childhood and American culture.

Reinterprets Stendhal's metaphor and tracks the different worlds of a wide array of 20th-century writers.

Comprehensive view of the major literary movements in Western history.

Essays on the lives, work, and influence of modern American women writers.

Illustrated introductory guide to key British, American and Australian works that shows developments in children's literature over time and across genres.

Includes essays and interviews with scholars and authors who reveal that despite pressures of assimilation, personal goals, and in some cases, anti-Semitism, they have never been able to divorce their lives or literature from being Jewish.

Introduces readers to the history of the novel in the 20th century and demonstrates its ongoing relevance as a literary form.

Uses readings of prose and poetry from both the U. S. and abroad to highlight the variety of ways modernist writers represented the quotidian details of modern life, even during times of political crisis and war.

Explores and celebrates the rise and development of modernist and avant-garde literatures and theories of this particular period, from Imagism to the Apocalypse movement.

Discusses modernist poetics and explores the peculiarities of the American literary field.

Probes the work of three writers who wrestled with new conceptions of time, place, and civilization.

Argues that various kinds of influences, inheritances, and indebtedness exist between well-known 20th century authors and canonical Romantic writers.

Describes the history and characteristics of ethnic and multicultural children's literature in the U.S.

Addresses the social, cultural, and critical issues of our times through the use of multicultural children's books.

Guide to selecting high-quality examples of multicultural literature.

Reviews and evaluates picturebooks with a multicultural theme for grades K-4.

Explores contemporary feminist, postmodernist, and postcolonial women writers' use and revisions of fairy tales and myths.

Loaded with specific titles that will interest 4th - 9th graders in books and keep them reading during this crucial period.

Examines case studies of British, Caribbean, and American poetries from the 1920s through the 1990s.

Investigates a selection of the most important Native American novels and examines the process of understanding literature on its own terms.

Provides a series of stimulating insights into Gothic writing, its history and genealogy.

Recovers a much ignored model of political theater for cultural criticism.

Demonstrates the importance of rurality to the imaginative construction of modernism/modernity and asserts that women had a special stake in that relation.

Tells of over 500 literary locales across the United States and Europe.

Connects social reform to the formal features of literary works and relationships between English and the U.S. through novel-writing.

Probes the trilogy's meaning using several literary theories.

Considers the ways in which readers feel when they read, and how they understand ideas of feeling.

Surveys the history of Western poetry from the ancient world, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the modern period.

Presents the genre of mythopoeic fantasy from a holistic perspective, arguing that this central genre of fantasy literature is largely misunderstood as a result of decades of incomplete and reductionist literary studies.

Tracks the nation/South juxtaposition in U.S. literature from the founding to the turn of the 20th century, through genres including travel writing, gothic and romance novels, geography textbooks, transcendentalist prose, and abolitionist address.

Shows that conceptions of privacy in the 19th century became meaningful only when posed in opposition to the encroaching forces of market capitalism and commodification.

A single-volume source of original scholarship on early American literature.

Addresses Willa Cather and Mary Austin as central figures in a women's tradition of the pictured West.

Argues persuasively for new attention to the oft-neglected issue of class in southern literary studies.

Features over 125 American, English, Irish and AngloIndian plays by 70 dramatists that were published between 1890 and 1918 in 14 American general interest periodicals aimed at the middle-class reader and consumer.

Explains why Poe wrote the way he did and why his achievement was so important to American literature.

Includes the work of more than 130 poets-from Asia and the Middle East to Europe and America, from ancient times to the present-and demonstrates how poetry responds to the challenges of our modern world.

Explores 19th-century poetry as it addresses and engages in the major concerns of American cultural life.

Analyzes the criticism of English-language literature from the major regions and countries of the postcolonial world.

Investigates the emerging gaps between literary scholarship and the reading experience itself.

An anthology of New Criticism of American poetry which is marked by a rigorously close textual reading detached from biographical or other extra-textual material.

Discusses how literature influences the United States.

Explores the roots of the epic fiction of John Updike, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo.

Each chapter is devoted to a particular novel and provides a plot summary, an overview of the work's historical background, a literary analysis, and suggestions for further reading.

Invites readers to rethink prevailing accounts of the relationship between slavery, liberalism, and literary representation.

Uses conservative-themed children's books to study such diverse fields as cultural studies, literary criticism, political science, childhood studies, brand marketing, and the cult of celebrity.

Examines what it means to return to works of fiction that have influenced us.

Provides valuable insights into the evolution and diversity of fictional genres produced in the United States from the late 18th century until the Civil War.

Addresses the middle generation of American poets, including the familiar (Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, and John Berryman-) and various important contemporaries (Delmore Schwartz, Theodore Roethke, Robert Hayden, and Lorine Niedecker).

Promotes reading women's poems, rather than forming theories about them, and tells why until quite recently anthologies of English poetry contained very few poems by women.

Explores the eventful times in which Baum lived, which influenced nearly every aspect of the Oz tales.

Clusters the work of five masters - Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, and Raymond Carver - to offer a poetics of the form for students and scholars.

Focuses on the complex ways writers such as Maria S. Cummins, Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Abigail Dodge, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Constance Fenimore Woolson put valorized "natural" feminine traits into practice.

Explores magical realism as a common denominator in the literature of the Americas.

Contains selected titles in high-interest topics and provides context to spotlight passages.

Reevaluates the New Critical corpus, traces its legacy, and explores resources it might offer for the future of theory, criticism, and pedagogy.

Explores how well-known women writers have influenced us in our writing and in life.

Shows literature undergraduates how to use their research time efficiently and how to locate and evaluate materials.

Reveals that women, as subjects of writing and as writing subjects themselves, played a far more important role in shaping the landscape of modernism than has been previously acknowledged.

Study of the co-emergence of the U.S. nation and the new literary genre of the novel.

Argues for a transgeographical perspective from which to study the literary and cultural histories of the Americas.

Uses seven popular novels about the Civil War to show that the war owes much of its cultural power to postwar memoirs, regimental histories, and other narratives authored by Union and Confederate veterans.

Analyzes several key works that mark the most significant phases in the early evolution of science fiction.

Claims that the history of the U.S. is hidden-in plain sight-within the pages of 20th-century American fiction and non-fiction literature.

Helps readers to appreciate the full impact of impressionist aesthetics on modern British and Irish writers.

Explores the ethical implication of the nearly universal human obsession with narratives.

Looks at the importance and, for many adolescent girls, life-changing nature of young adult literature.

Identifies a Virgil who speaks in female tones of the anxieties, exclusions pleasures and threats of the contemporary world.

Discusses the status of Jewish poetry, Jewish poets, and the ways in which displacement, exile, mourning, gender, and prayer contribute to the shaping of the Jewish American imagination and its poetic production.

Provides a social history of girls' series fiction published in America from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twenty-first century.

Present six key modernist poem in the light of emergent modernism.

Takes a vexed, often funny, and always thoughtful tour of many house museums of well-known American authors.

Captures and examines sociological insights in 32 essays that discuss scholars and writers not normally associated with any sociological school of thought.

Comprehensive guide to 604 writers from the southern U.S. states.

Brings to light the important role played by drama between the Depression and the conclusion of World War 2.

Features a biographical sketch of the author, a list of characters, a summary of the plot, and critical and analytical views of the work.

Gathers the major and emerging women fiction writers from the Caribbean.

Describe the actions, desires, thoughts, and emotions of nearly 900 characters from American fiction.

Seeks to recuperate the idea of a common American culture while simultaneously recognizing how much that tradition has occluded.

Analyzes the phenomenon of American picture books and what their imaginative form and content reveal about the modern nation.

Argues that Eliot's poetry (and drama and criticism) can be seen as a unified and coherent body of work.

Nuanced, discerning account of a life famously flawed in its search for perfection.

Presents the history of the 20th-century American novel as a continuous narrative dialogue between white and black voices.

Covers over 2,000 popular Young Adult titles in a wide variety of genres.

Provides an overview of the field of Young Adult literature, focusing primarily on fiction.

Addresses the ways literature and theory have engaged with literary criticism, philosophy, and history and related concerns.

Essays on Sendak, Steig, Gorey, L. Frank Baum, Tomi Ungerer, Jack Keats, Margot Zemach, and Ursula Nordstrom that show the integration of text and image, the abilities of authors and artists of picture books to somehow change our perceptions.

Anthology of the final works of great poets.

Argues that the private homes in transnational women's fiction reflect public legacies of colonialism.

Shows that The Da Vinci Code is filled with numerous historical mistakes, and offers background information on early Christianity from an unbelieving skeptic.

Combines memoir with family history and reflections on the creatures and beings that command Silko's attention and inform her vision of the world, taking readers along on her daily walks through the arroyos and ledges of the Sonoran desert in Arizona.

Analyse major film adaptations of 20th century American fiction.

Asserts that the classics can be part of a self-conscious, prideful approach to African American culture, esthetics, and identity.

Shows how the meaning of Uncle Tom's Cabin changed over time.

Research guide for a new generation of undergraduates.

With primary documents and critical analysis, situates war fiction and poetry within the historical contexts of WWI and relates it to issues of diplomacy, combat, propaganda, women's perspectives, and the aftermath of war.

Explores the modernist commitment to "unknowing" by addressing the work of three supreme experimental writers: Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner.

Several of today's finest writers introduce little-known treasures of literature that they count among their favorite books.

Showcases 350 years of poetry and fiction by American women.

Uses pairings of key writers and painters to track the varied meanings of the self in America.

Traces the steady rise of antiwar writing in American literature from the Civil War to the eve of World War I.

Surveys the Western dramatic tradition from Ancient Greece to modern America.

Humorous tour of the Western literary canon from the ancient Greeks to the Modernists.

Describes the distorted, canonized history of the 20th-century American novel as a record of modern classics insufficiently appreciated in their day but recuperated by scholars in order to shape the grand tradition of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner.

Examines the ways in which antebellum women novelists tried to counter Harriet Beecher Stowe's enormously popular Uncle Tom's Cabin by preaching a "theology of whiteness" from within the pages of the books.

Defends a rich conception of the space of literature that retains its links to issues of self-formation and metaphysics and does not let that space collapse into just another reflection of social space.

Presents a bite-sized piece of literary history that looks at the origins and composition of 50 well-known pieces of literature.

Tours nearly 200 bestselling books, ferrets out their persistent themes and determines what those say about what we believe and how we relate to one another.

Enters the consciousness an influential figure in the history of American letters to reveal a complicated and painfully honest figure who came of age in an era of political corruption, industrial greed, and American imperialism.

Women readers, editors, librarians, authors, journalists, booksellers, and others are the subjects in this stimulating new collection on modern print culture.

Contributes to current feminist scholarship on the "gender of modernism" and challenges the assumption that modernism rose naturally or inevitably to the forefront of the cultural landscape at the turn of the 20th century.

Analyses novels written by and for women from 1945 to the present.

Explores the simultaneous entry of working-class women in the U.S. into wage-earning factory labor and into opportunities for mental and literary development.

Sshows how both modernist and postcolonial writers borrowed metaphors and concepts from geography, advancing theories of space, culture, and community within the formal structures of literary narrative.

Survey of YA literature that deals with a variety of topics.

Contains 100 of the greatest poems written by 48 women in English over the past 150 years.

Weaves a tapestry from the many strands of American religious experience and practice.

Examines contemporary art and literature that grapple with the perennial questions of religious faith from Image journal.

Explores the cultural consequences of the rather sudden 19th century emergence of unbelief as a widespread social and intellectual option in the English-speaking world.

Reviews and critiques the works of many Christian authors who created mythological stories.

Surveys the history of poetics and provides an introduction and brief biography for each reading.

Provides a comprehensive treatment of the development of the novel in the United States from its emergence in the 18th century to the present.

Argues against the idea that postmodernism has undermined the association between religious practice and literature and suggests that the novel has become an increasingly vital, dynamic and problematic space for engaging with the sacred.

Gives readers the opportunity to listen in on the author's thoughtful conversations with ten contemporary writers,
especially for what they say about "wrestling with the sacred" in their writing.

Account of a streetwise and cynical newfound faith of a famous screenwriter, and of how he discovers God in the most intimate and routine moments of life.

Contends that the uneven separation of church and state in America, far from safeguarding an arena for democratic flourishing, has functioned instead to promote particular forms of religious possibility while containing, suppressing, or excluding others.

Approaches the thought of three colonial New England divines--Increase Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and Edward Taylor--from the perspective of literary theory.

Pairs full-color reproductions of some of Rembrandt's most powerful religious paintings with finely crafted poems reflecting on them.

Examines Christian literature's place in American culture today and explores the cultural meaning and significance of very popular Christian fiction now available.

Explores the relationship between the smaller units of construction in a literary work and the work's larger themes in William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and other Southern writers.

Explores the history of women and feminism throughout literature, from classical antiquity to modern times.

Offers a wide range of perspectives that explore our changing views of violence in a post-9/11 world and inform our understanding of a writer whose fiction abounds in violence.

Assesses the impact of the mid-century political, religious, and social milieu on novels and short stories that attract attention today and relates O'Connor to the issues of her day and concerns of the early 21st century.

Sets O'Connor and Percy against the background of the Southern Renaissance from which they emerged and showing how they shared a distinctly Christian notion of art that led them to see fiction as revelatory and how their methods of revelation took them in different directions.

Evaluates Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, the Bronte sisters, Victor Hugo, Herman Melville, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Mark Twain, and Ralph Ellison from an orthodox Christian perspective.

Shows how the types of character, plot, setting, and symbol that Hawthorne used in his four best known novels were drawn from his reading of the Bible.

Equips readers to become better writers by introducing quality writing with over 60 classic and contemporary selections from numerous writers.

Offers thoughts about O'Connor as a writer preoccupied with religious, and especially Catholic, theories.

Focuses on Christian theology and post-1800 British literature, but also refers to earlier writers, texts from North America and mainland Europe, and other faith positions.

Seeks to bring to light the vital role that religion has played in the literature of the U.S.

Recommends a core collection of Christian fiction for young readers and their families.

Reveals Madeleine L'Engle in all her complexity, through a series of incisive interviews with the people who knew her most intimately.

Essays on the major concerns and questions regarding literature and theology.

Demonstrates ways of reading novels and stories from a Christian perspective.

Argues that the religious import of American environmental literature have perennially construed the nonhuman world to be a source of "something that takes us out of ourselves."

Covers over 500 classic and contemporary works of Christian fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, providing a plot summary, analysis of Christian themes, and an annotated bibliography for each title.

Offers the idea that the modern "crisis of faith" is not a matter of vanishing spiritual concerns and energy but rather of their disorientation, even as they remain pervasive forces in human affairs.

Tells how classic literature inspired Christian authors.

Examines case studies of British, Caribbean, and American poetries from the 1920s through the 1990s.

Presents the genre of mythopoeic fantasy from a holistic perspective, arguing that this central genre of fantasy literature is largely misunderstood as a result of decades of incomplete and reductionist literary studies.

Illuminates the ways in which Elizabeth Bishop's Protestant childhood and reading of Christian literature, coupled with her deep commitment to agnosticism, inform the works of this former poet laureate of the U.S.

Examines what it means to return to works of fiction that have influenced us.

Promotes reading women's poems, rather than forming theories about them, and tells why until quite recently anthologies of English poetry contained very few poems by women.

Clusters the work of five masters - Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, and Raymond Carver - to offer a poetics of the form for students and scholars.

Uses literature and culture to show how anti-Catholic sentiment particularly shaped U.S. conceptions of pluralism and its relationship to diverse issues in society.

Show that Christian humanism informs a broad and important literature and encourages a genuine diversity of thought based on reason, nature, and the accomplishments of artistic genius.

Examines the role that evangelical romance fiction plays in the devotional life of Christian women.

Contains an array of reflections on topics surrounding the often-perilous intersection of writing and faith.

Shows us that in most instances style and faith remain apart, but that when the two are in accord the work are are witnesses against the enemies of truth.

Madeleine L'Engle's circle of friends and peers (writers, poets, scholars, theologians) provide an intimate portrait of L'Engle and respond to her writings and mentoring influence.

Explores the place of faith in the lives of writers who wrote after Ralph Waldo Emerson's influential 1837 call to establish a national literary culture free from "the learning of other lands."

Describes the very different sorts of poetry Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville wrote, their comparable reasons for writing as they did, and the posthumous critical effects of their having done so.

Comprehensive and original history of the American novel's first century.

Shows how the rise of chance shaped the way nineteenth-century American writers confronted questions of doubt and belief.

Uses pairings of key writers and painters to track the varied meanings of the self in America.

Examines Wendell Berry's main themes of community, place, and conservation in his writings

Offers a window into the soul of American culture and its literary figures.

Presents the 25 most spiritually influential and important books for Christians to read.

Interviews of detailed and personal stories from veteran screenwriters of the seventies and eighties focusing on their craft, their lives, and their profession.

Interviews of detailed and personal stories from 13 veteran screenwriters of the 90s, focusing on their craft, their lives, and their profession.

Hill's criticism of poets (including Jonson, Dryden, Hopkins, Whitman, Eliot, and Yeats ) and prose writers (such as Tyndale, Clarendon, Hobbes, Burton, Emerson, and F. H. Bradley).

Account of a streetwise and cynical newfound faith of a famous screenwriter, and of how he discovers God in the most intimate and routine moments of life.

Brings alive Lawson's era of screenwriting and drama in the 1930s and 1940s and features many of his prominent friends and associates.

Explores the impact of the war on writers including Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass.

Features books from a wide variety of genres-contemporary fiction, romance, sci-fi, fantasy, Westerns, and more-each carrying a Christian message for adults.

Explores and celebrates the rise and development of modernist and avant-garde literatures and theories of this particular period, from Imagism to the Apocalypse movement.

Examines this Pulitzer Prize winning legend with a meticulously researched, sensitive look at the life and work of a major American screenwriter.

Explores 19th-century poetry as it addresses and engages in the major concerns of American cultural life.

Gives insight into the process and development of presidential speechwriting from Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration to Ronald Reagan's.

Reports on a 2008 symposium devoted to modern presidents' speechmaking processes that included nine former speechwriters reporting on their work for every president from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton.

Considers the development of modernism in the novel in relation to changing attitudes to religion.

Tells of 13 screenwriters who are internationally renowned and respected for their skill at delineating plot and capturing character make them.

Insider's view of politics, critique of presidential and congressional rhetoric, and personal look at the political leaders for whom he wrote speeches.

Fifty screenwriters share how they broke into the business, how they transformed their ideas into box-office blockbusters, how their words helped launch the careers of major stars, and how they earned accolades and Academy Awards.

Traces the art of screenwriting from the era of the studio system and the blacklist through the rise of the writer/director. (Library Journal)

Examines the role played by the men and women who help presidents find the words they hope will define their places in history - from FDR to George W. Bush.

Comprehensive history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000.

Seeks to contextualize Swift within the political arena of his day.

Profiles and works of 78 writers from the first 200 years of African American literature.

Essays on the lives and literary achievements of black American writers from the first slave narratives down to contemporary figures.

Includes 1,300 biographies mostly from the U.S.

Includes biographical and critical entries for over 120 American Realistic and Naturalistic novelists, including Henry Adams, Sherwood Anderson, Saul Bellow, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Jack London.

Spans from colonial days to the present.

A resource of 35 male and female American writers of diverse ethnic backgrounds.

Concise information on known and little-known European women writers.

Looks at the life of Andrew Marvell from his early employment as a tutor and gentleman's companion to his suspicious death, reputedly a politically fueled poisoning.

From the ravaged streets of Russia to the hard-luck streets of Hollywood, we see how Ayn Rand worked her way up from a poor immigrant girl to a working screenwriter for Cecil B. De Mille, and from a wardrobe girl at RKO to a world-famous author and philosopher.

Recovers the lost lives and poems of British women poets of the Romantic era.

Covers hundreds of writers who have made contributions to British, Irish and Commonwealth literature from the 14th century to the present day.

Learn about the books that boys love to read, uncover the signs that point to the reading gap, find creative new programming ideas to match boys' interests, and establish a strategic blueprint for boys and reading.

Includes concise biographical data on the writer and an original, signed critical essay.

Profiles of 50 modern Southern writers of essays, poems, drama, and novels.

Offers a collection of interviews with America's youngest and first female African American Poet Laureate.

The author essays include coverage of biography and achievements as well as literary and contextual analysis of major works.

Entries have been updated with regard to biographical data, listings of principal works, secondary bibliography, and timeliness of the text.

Entries have been updated with regard to biographical data, listings of principal works, secondary bibliography, and timeliness of the text.

Offers young adult readers a way to appreciate the lives and works of this special group of fiction writers.

The reading habits, intellectual development, and contributions of the cultural giants of the 20th century are traced.

Contains entries on 168 writers of African-American descent writing in all forms.

Provides a comprehensive and wide-ranging resource which includes information on many previously neglected British women writers and topics.

Considers the writings of the British dynasty family, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and Shelley collectively.

Includes essays of authors, poets, and people from many other walks of life.

Contains brief biographical sketches, reviews of major themes, and criticism and selected bibliographical lists of works by and about 50 Western U.S. writers

Examines southern women writers and explores the craft of writing while tracing her own development from rebellious college student to award-winning author of 19 books.

Tells the story behind the creator and sustainer of the Nancy Drew series.

Offers a reassessment of the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand and examines her life, her ideas, and her impact on conservative political thought.

Provides lively annotations for over 500 booksfor bablies and toddlers divided into the following categories: Nursery Rhymes, Fingerplays, and Songs; and Picture-Story Books for the Very Young.

Lists the publications, surveys the lives, and examines the literary careers of the major world authors

Recounts the full adventures of Harriet Jacobs, before and after slavery.

Presents career biographies and criticism of Japanese writers from between 1868-1945.

Presents career biographies and criticism of Japanese writers since World War II.

Demonstrates how Johnson's criticism has for long been divided from the issues of modern criticism by historical narratives that have marked the progress of criticism from 'classic to romantic'.

Uses previously unpublished letters by women writers to explore the act and art of writing from diverse perspectives and experiences.

Presents the lives and critical works of over 170 women writers in Latin America between the 16th and 20th centuries.

Traces the literary history of Mexico, Central America, the island republics from colonial times to the present.

Highlights the lives and extraordinary careers of Latina authors, as well as the social and political issues their works address.

Offers analysis of Stael's life and mentality.

Assesses the importance of the 1750s in literary history and argues that women novelists engaged in critical renovation of the novel as a genre and reclaimed it as a proto-feminist project.

Charts Melville's growth from the bawdy storytelling of Typee - the labial melody; of his "indulgent captivity" among the Polynesians; through the spiritual preoccupations building up to Moby-Dick and such later works.

Tells how 30 popular writers were influenced to write.

Essays on the lives, work, and influence of modern American women writers.

Contains 24 essays about writers whose work touched on Japanese youth in the closing decades of the 20th century.

Includes essays and interviews with scholars and authors who reveal that despite pressures of assimilation, personal goals, and in some cases, anti-Semitism, they have never been able to divorce their lives or literature from being Jewish.

Describes the careers of over 50 of the leading authors and editors who wrote for moral, social and political improvement in society.

Features authors from various countries and cultures who have lived in a culture other than their own and written about their experiences.

Profiles 80 significant African American literature writers spanning from the 18th century to the present.

Biographical sketches and analyses of 104 best known English, Scottish, and Irish writers of long fiction from the 15th through the 20th centuries.

Shows that conceptions of privacy in the 19th century became meaningful only when posed in opposition to the encroaching forces of market capitalism and commodification.

Documents Hopkins's early family life and her ancestral connections to 19th-century New England, the African slave trade, and 20th-century race activism in the North.

Offers the 1st full-length biography of the first English-speaking person of African descent to publish a book and only the 2nd woman of any race or background to do so in America.

Includes biographical-bibliographical entries on nearly 500 writers and approximately 550 entries focusing on significant works of world literature.

Aims to put women back on the map of seventeenth-century royalist literature from which they have habitually been marginalized.

Captures and examines sociological insights in 32 essays that discuss scholars and writers not normally associated with any sociological school of thought.

Comprehensive guide to 604 writers from the southern U.S. states.

Highlights some 330 major Spanish American novelists and poets.

Gathers the major and emerging women fiction writers from the Caribbean.

This annotated bibliography of stories for young adults from around the world and throughout the ages.

Contains essays on 116 contemporary supernatural fiction writers.

Profiles 100 writers whose work scholars deem has fundamentally established or changed how readers see the world.

Combines memoir with family history and reflections on the creatures and beings that command Silko's attention and inform her vision of the world, taking readers along on her daily walks through the arroyos and ledges of the Sonoran desert in Arizona.

Research guide for a new generation of undergraduates.

Lists Renaissance writers, a brief descriptive annotation, and relevant websites about them.

Looks at Collins's long and varied career in relation to the changing circumstances of his own life, a changing literary marketplace, and the changing worlds of 19th century Britain.

Enters the consciousness an influential figure in the history of American letters to reveal a complicated and painfully honest figure who came of age in an era of political corruption, industrial greed, and American imperialism.

Essays about the lives and accomplishments of 48 outstanding women in communication.

Women readers, editors, librarians, authors, journalists, booksellers, and others are the subjects in this stimulating new collection on modern print culture.

Collection of a wide variety of works by Spanish women writers of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Contains entries on 74 authors who were actively writing during the renaissance in 19th-century America.

Presents a panoramic view of literary life in Britain from 1870 to 1914, teasing out authors' relations with the reading public and tracing how reputations were made and unmade.

Consists of entries related to literature by and about African American women.

Analyzes the writings of five late medieval Castilian nuns who preceded Saint Teresa as authors, mystics, and individuals reacting to individual circumstances.