Subject Guide: Literature

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

Comprehensive bibliographic guide to literary works of approximately 300 American writers from the American Revolution to 1930.

Great works and authors of the world are introduced and reviewed artistically, intellectually, and theologically.

Examines how six female authors employed images of daily life to depict women's experience in Russian culture from the 1960s to the present.

Uses three emblematic figures--Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James, to examine how the Puritan legacy, especially the concept of conversion, shaped developments in American literature, theology, and pragmatist philosophy.

An annotated selection of Emerson's essential writings.

Tells of the unique and influential friendship between Emerson and Amos Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and their work that resulted in an enduring change in their nation's direction.

Focuses on Emerson and Thoreau as writers and maintains that Emerson and Thoreau were complementary literary geniuses, mutually inspiring and inspired.

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

Revisits the life of the nation's first public intellectual and discovers how he became a "representative man."

Explores the theme of friendship in the lives and works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

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.

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

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

Offers a synthesis of the most relevant interpretations of Emerson.

Illustrates the timeless nature of Emerson's insights by bringing them to life through 52 modern case studies.

Offers a broad view of the author's finest work, featuring his critical essays, poems, and letters, and journals.

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

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

This autobiographical account by a former slave is one of the few extant narratives written by a woman.

Adds Harriet A. Jacobs' brother's short slave narrative, "A True Tale of Slavery" to her autobiography of slavery.

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

Guide to the Harlem Renaissance (1918-1937), the most influential single movement in African American literary history.

Study of the African American novel that seeks to answer the question: what has been the impact of the African American vernacular tradition from the spirituals, blues, gospel, and jazz to hip hop on the structure and style of the modern African American novel?

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.

Highlights various works by this well-known African-American author.

Examines the cultural history of Zora Neale Hurston's writing and the reception of her work.

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

Guide to the Harlem Renaissance (1918-1937), the most influential single movement in African American literary history.

Collection of interviews with notable modern writer, Toni Morrison.

Designed to facilitate a richer understanding of Toni Morrison’s work and promote critical thinking by asking students to investigate issues of whiteness, historiography, critical race theory, and narratology.

Comprehensive history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000.

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

Study of the African American novel that seeks to answer the question: what has been the impact of the African American vernacular tradition from the spirituals, blues, gospel, and jazz to hip hop on the structure and style of the modern African American novel?

Defines postmodernism, compares and contrasts it with modernism, and places it in its historical context, and discusses the major theorists of postmodernism.

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

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

Focues on the role of the acts of reading depicted in Proust's novel, A la recherche du temps perdu.

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

Traces the controversial author's life from her childhood in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution to her years as a screenwriter in Hollywood, the publication of her blockbuster novels, and the rise and fall of the cult that formed around her in the 1950s and 1960s.

A provocative examination of Ayn Rand's ideas and her enormous impact on American culture and politics - from Alan Greenspan to the Tea Party.

Cover the writing of Atlas Shrugged, its publication history, and its reception.

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

Considers the fiction and philosophy of Ayn Rand and its lack of spiritual inadequacy and satisfaction.

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

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

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

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.

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

Compares the factual details of an event, political or artistic movement, or life with the literary treatment it inspired.

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

Covers the six decades since the end of World War II.

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.

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

Comprehensive history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000.

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

Tells how classic literature inspired Christian authors.

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.

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.

Argues that Swift turned his back on the elite to write for a popular audience and that he annexed scandals to his fictionalized print alter ego, creating a continual demand for works by or about this self-mythologized figure.

Draws on discoveries made over the past 30 years to tell the story of Swift's life.

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