Explores how American Literature has represented the sound and spirit of popular musicFrom the birth of rhythm and blues to the rise of hip-hop, American writers have long grappled with how to capture in words the energy, rebellion, and cultural power of popular music. Popular Music and American Literary Culture traces this complex relationship, offering the most comprehensive exploration yet of how novelists, poets, and playwrights have responded to the s...

At various stages of his life, the celebrated American writer William Faulkner (1897-1962) presented himself as a literary dandy, a shabby bohemian, a humble farmer, a courtly lover, and a genteel but aloof Southerner. In private and public, he was masterful at making people wonder who he really was. As Kirk Curnutt acknowledges, Faulkner was first and foremost a storyteller. Faulkner’s experiments in style and form radically challenged conceptions of the American South, race and the exper...

Presenting the first interdisciplinary consideration of his political thought, Updike and Politics: New Considerations establishes a new scholarly foundation for assessing one of the most recognized and significant American writers of the post-1945 period. This book brings together a diverse group of American and international scholars, including contributors from Japan, India, Israel, and Europe. Like Updike himself, the collection canvases a wide range of topics, including Updike’s too o...

From Captain Ahab to Yuri Zhivago, discover the most remarkable characters in fiction.Huckleberry Finn, Anna Karenina, Harry Potter, Hester Prynne . . . these are just a handful of remarkable characters found in literature, but of course the list is virtually endless! But why ponder which of these creations are the greatest? More than just a topic to debate with friends, the greatest characters from fiction help readers comprehend history, culture, politics, and even their own plac...

The Romance of Regionalism in the Work of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald: The South Side of Paradise explores resonances of "Southernness" in works by American culture’s leading literary couple. At the height of their fame, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald dramatized their relationship as a romance of regionalism, as the charming tale of a Northern man wooing a Southern belle. Their writing exposes deeper sectional conflicts, however: from the seemingly unexorcisable fixation with the...

This thought-provoking collection explores significant new facets of an American author of lasting international stature.“Edited by three eminent Fitzgerald scholars, this fine book comprises nineteen incisive and provocative essays (most written for this collection) by . . . well-known Fitzgerald critics. The content is as varied as the international origins of its authors.” —ChoiceAs the author of some of the most compelling short stories ever wr...

"No other work has focused so sharply and revealed so clearly the vitality of Hemingway's time in Key West. Key West Hemingway shows that even as his Papa persona grew during the 1930s, Hemingway continued to generate a significant body of nuanced and complex (if also misunderstood) experimental prose. With keen scrutiny and brilliance, these fresh and readable essays rediscover and give us Hemingway's multifaceted American literary voices."--Linda Patterson Miller, editor of ...

'Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.' F. Scott Fitzgerald's first story collection, Flappers and Philosophers, appeared in 1920 on the heels of his debut novel, This Side of Paradise, and immediately established him as a master of popular fiction. Love stories such as 'The Offshore Pirate' and 'Head and Shoulders' capture the spectacle and fantasy of the Jazz Age, celebrating that modern icon of feminine self-possession, the flapper, while co...

American Literature in Transition, 1970–1980 examines the literary developments of the twentieth-century's gaudiest decade. For a quarter century, filmmakers, musicians, and historians have returned to the era to explore the legacy of Watergate, stagflation, and Saturday Night Fever, uncovering the unique confluence of political and economic phenomena that make the period such a baffling time. Literary historians have never shown much interest in the era, however - a remarkable omission co...

The subject of endless biographies, fictional depictions, and critical debate, Ernest Hemingway continues to command attention in popular culture and in literary studies. He remains both a definitive stylist of twentieth-century literature and a case study in what happens to an artist consumed by the spectacle of celebrity. The New Hemingway Studies examines how two decades of new-millennium scholarship confirm his continued relevance to an era that, on the surface, appears so distinct fro...

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned*,* has frequently been dismissed as an outlier and curiosity in his oeuvre, a transitional work from the coming-of-age plot of This Side of Paradise to the masterful critique of American aspiration in The Great Gatsby*.*The Beautiful and Damned belongs to a genre that is widely misunderstood, the “bright young things” novel in which spoiled and wealthy characters succumb to decay becaus...