Fictive Fathers In The Contemporary American Novel

Author : Debra Shostak
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2020-02-20
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781501340062

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Fictive Fathers in the Contemporary American Novel by Debra Shostak Pdf

Fictive Fathers in the Contemporary American Novel explores the unstable construction of heteronormative white masculinity in the contemporary United States by focusing on relationships between fathers and their children. Debra Shostak reads the novels of 18 North American writers publishing in the late 20th and early 21st centuries as allegories of cultural conflict and change within the nuclear family; the authors considered include Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Franzen, John Irving, Jonathan Lethem, Carole Maso, Bobbie Ann Mason, Cormac McCarthy, Claire Messud, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tim O'Brien, Marilynne Robinson, Philip Roth, Mona Simpson, Jane Smiley, and Anne Tyler. These novelists portray father figures who, often literally or figuratively absent from the family scene, disrupt the familial order and their family members' identities. Shostak's close readings illuminate unexpectedly conservative, even subversive, ideological positions at the heart of these fictions. Fictive Fathers traces the eroding myth of paternal authority that sustained a patriarchal model within real American families and their literary representations.

Author : Patrick O'Donnell,Stephen J. Burn,Lesley Larkin
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 1607 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2022-03-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781119431718

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The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, 2 Volumes by Patrick O'Donnell,Stephen J. Burn,Lesley Larkin Pdf

Fresh perspectives and eye-opening discussions of contemporary American fiction In The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020, a team of distinguished scholars delivers a focused and in-depth collection of essays on some of the most significant and influential authors and literary subjects of the last four decades. Cutting-edge entries from established and new voices discuss subjects as varied as multiculturalism, contemporary regionalisms, realism after poststructuralism, indigenous narratives, globalism, and big data in the context of American fiction from the last 40 years. The Encyclopedia provides an overview of American fiction at the turn of the millennium as well as a vision of what may come. It perfectly balances analysis, summary, and critique for an illuminating treatment of the subject matter. This collection also includes: An exciting mix of established and emerging contributors from around the world discussing central and cutting-edge topics in American fiction studies Focused, critical explorations of authors and subjects of critical importance to American fiction Topics that reflect the energies and tendencies of contemporary American fiction from the forty years between 1980 and 2020 The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020 is a must-have resource for undergraduate and graduate students of American literature, English, creative writing, and fiction studies. It will also earn a place in the libraries of scholars seeking an authoritative array of contributions on both established and newer authors of contemporary fiction.

Author : Kenneth Millard
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2007-04-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780748629541

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Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fiction by Kenneth Millard Pdf

This book explores the ways in which a range of recent American novelists have handled the genre of the 'coming-of-age' novel, or the Bildungsroman. Novels of this genre characteristically dramatise the vicissitudes of growing up and the trials and tribulations of young adulthood, often presented through depictions of immediate family relationships and other social structures. This book considers a variety of different American cultures (in terms of race, class and gender) and a range of contemporary coming-of-age novels, so that aesthetic judgements about the fiction might be made in the context of the social history that fiction represents. A series of questions are asked:* Does the coming-of-age moment in these novels coincide with an interpretation of the 'fall' of America?* What kind of national commentary does it therefore facilitate?* Is the Bildungsroman a quintessentially American genre?* What can it usefully tell us about contemporary American culture? Although the focus is on the conte

Author : Ruth Maxey
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 278 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2020-07-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783030418977

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21st Century US Historical Fiction by Ruth Maxey Pdf

This new collection examines important US historical fiction published since 2000. Exploring historical novels by established American writers such as Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, E.L. Doctorow, Chang-rae Lee, James McBride, Susan Choi, and George Saunders, the book also includes chapters on first-time novelists. Individual essays in 21st Century US Historical Fiction: Contemporary Responses to the Past tackle prominent and provocative new novels, for example, recent Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction by Anthony Doerr, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Colson Whitehead. Interrogating such key themes as war, race, sexuality, trauma and childhood; notions of genre and periodization; and recent theorizations of historical fiction, scholars from the United States, Canada, Britain and Ireland analyze an emerging canon of contemporary historical fiction by an ethno-racially diverse range of major American writers.

Author : Catherine Morley
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 227 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2008-09-25
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781135899592

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The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction by Catherine Morley Pdf

This volume explores the confluences between two types of literature in contemporary America: the novel and the epic. It analyses the tradition of the epic as it has evolved from antiquity, through Joyce to its American manifestations and describes how this tradition has impacted upon contemporary American writing.

Author : Aliki Varvogli
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 181 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2012-03-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781136627033

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Travel and Dislocation in Contemporary American Fiction by Aliki Varvogli Pdf

This book offers a critical study and analysis of American fiction at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It focuses on novels that ‘go outward’ literally and metaphorically, and it concentrates on narratives that take place mainly away from the US’s geographical borders. Varvogli draws on current theories of travel globalization and post-national studies, and proposes a dynamic model that will enable scholars to approach contemporary American fiction and assess recent changes and continuities. Concentrating on work by Philip Caputo, Dave Eggers, Norman Rush and Russell Banks, the book proposes that American literature’s engagement with Africa has shifted and needs to be approached using new methodologies. Novels by Amy Tan, Garrison Keillor, Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers are examined in the context of travel and globalization, and works by Chang-rae Lee, Ethan Canin, Dinaw Mengestu and Jhumpa Lahiri are used as examples of the changing face of the American immigrant novel, and the changing meaning of national belonging.

Author : Peter Ferry
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 182 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2014-08-21
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317743156

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Masculinity in Contemporary New York Fiction by Peter Ferry Pdf

Masculinity in Contemporary New York Fiction is an interdisciplinary study that presents masculinity as a key thematic concern in contemporary New York fiction. This study argues that New York authors do not simply depict masculinity as a social and historical construction but seek to challenge the archetypal ideals of masculinity by writing counter-hegemonic narratives. Gendering canonical New York writers, namely Paul Auster, Bret Easton Ellis, and Don DeLillo, illustrates how explorations of masculinity are tied into the principal themes that have defined the American novel from its very beginning. The themes that feature in this study include the role of the novel in American society; the individual and (urban) society; the journey from innocence to awareness (of masculinity); the archetypal image of the absent and/or patriarchal father; the impact of homosocial relations on the everyday performance of masculinity; male sexuality; and the male individual and globalization. What connects these contemporary New York writers is their employment of the one of the great figures in the history of literature: the flâneur. These authors take the flâneur from the shadows of the Manhattan streets and elevate this figure to the role of self-reflexive agent of male subjectivity through which they write counter-hegemonic narratives of masculinity. This book is an essential reference for those with an interest in gender studies and contemporary American fiction.

Author : Beatrice Pire,Arnaud Regnauld,Pierre-Louis Patoine
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2021-12-31
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781782847120

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Contemporary American Fiction in the Embrace of the Digital Age by Beatrice Pire,Arnaud Regnauld,Pierre-Louis Patoine Pdf

This collection aims to examine the relationship between American fiction and innovations that marked the first decades of the 21st century: the Internet, social media, smart objects and environments, artificial intelligence, nanotechnologies, genetic engineering and other biotechnologies, transhumanism. These technological innovations redefine the way we live in and imagine our world, interact with each other and understand the human being in his or her ever closer relationship to the machine a human being no longer, as in the past, cared for or repaired, but now enhanced or replaced. What about our artistic and cultural practices? Are these recent advances changing language and literature? How is fiction transformed by technological progress and what representations of progress can it oppose? Can fiction offer a critique of the new media and the upheavals they precipitate? How does the temporality of literature respond to a technical time subjected to the imperative of efficiency, where the present is a slave to the future? Do virtual worlds challenge the primacy of literary fiction as a privileged mode of escape from daily life? In a context where software can generate literary works, can the force of poetical advent still oppose algorithmic logics? What becomes of the body in a world in which its technical extensions increase the externalization of its cognitive functions in media artifacts and digital networks? In order to explore these questions, scholars here investigate the American fiction of Russell Banks, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Tao Lin, Richard Powers, Kenneth Goldsmith, Jennifer Egan or Jonathan Franzen as well as the Cyberpunk genre and the Neuronovel.

Author : Lorna Piatti-Farnell
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 198 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2011-07-13
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781136645549

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Food and Culture in Contemporary American Fiction by Lorna Piatti-Farnell Pdf

Establishing an interdisciplinary connection between Food Studies and American literary scholarship, Piatti-Farnell investigates the significances of food and eating in American fiction, from 1980 to the present day. She argues that culturally-coded representations of the culinary illuminate contemporary American anxieties about class gender, race, tradition, immigration, nationhood, and history. As she offers a critical analysis of major works of contemporary fiction, Piatti-Farnell unveils contrasting modes of culinary nostalgia, disillusionment, and progress that pervasively address the cultural disintegration of local and familiar culinary values, in favor of globalized economies of consumption. In identifying different incarnations of the "American culinary," Piatti-Farnell covers the depiction of food in specific categories of American fiction and explores how the cultural separation that molds food preferences inevitably challenges the existence of a homogenous American identity. The study treads on new grounds since it not only provides the first comprehensive study of food and consumption in contemporary American fiction, but also aims to expose interrelated politics of consumption in a variety of authors from different ethnic, cultural, racial and social backgrounds within the United States.

Author : David Brauner
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2010-04-20
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780748629817

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Contemporary American Fiction by David Brauner Pdf

This is an accessible, lucid and incisive study that will prove indispensable to students and scholars of contemporary American fiction. Featuring a wide range of authors - from canonical figures such as Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Annie Proulx, to increasingly influential writers such as Jeffrey Eugenides, Gish Jen and Richard Powers - the book combines detailed readings of key texts with informative discussions of their historical, social and cultural contexts. There are chapters focusing on formal characteristics (the use of irony and paradox in novels by Don DeLillo, Paul Auster and Bret Easton Ellis, and the generic properties of the texts and films of Cold Mountain, 'Brokeback Mountain' and No Country for Old Men) and on thematic concerns (the representation of gender and sexuality in novels by Jane Smiley, Carol Shields and Jeffrey Eugenides and of ethnicity, race and hybridity in fiction by Gish Jen, Philip Roth and Richard Powers). Running through all these chapters is an interrogation of all three elements making up the phrase 'contemporary American fiction'.Key Features* Identifies some of the main trends in contemporary American fiction and situates them in historical and cultural contexts* Discusses a representative range of recent fiction, providing a sense of the rich diversity of the field and of its key themes and modes of writing* Introduces students to a variety of critical approaches to, and debates concerning, contemporary American fiction* Encourages reflection on the nature of national, gender, ethnic and generic identities

Author : Lydia R. Cooper
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 411 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2021-12-26
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781000504958

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The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture by Lydia R. Cooper Pdf

Recently, the U.S. has seen a rise in misogynistic and race-based violence perpetrated by men expressing a sense of grievance, from "incels" to alt-right activists. Grounding sociological, historical, political, and economic analyses of masculinity through the lens of cultural narratives in many forms and expressions, The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture suggests that how we examine the stories that shape us in turn shapes our understanding of our current reality and gives us language for imagining better futures. Masculinity is more than a description of traits associated with particular performances of gender. It is more than a study of gender and social power. It is an examination of the ways in which gender affects our capacity to engage ethically with each other in complex human societies. This volume offers essays from a range of established, global experts in American masculinity as well as new and upcoming scholars in order to explore not just what masculinity once meant, has come to mean, and may mean in the future in the U.S.; it also articulates what is at stake with our conceptions of masculinity.

Author : Erik V. R. Rangno
Publisher : Infobase Publishing
Page : 97 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : American literature
ISBN : 9781438118550

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Contemporary American Literature, 1945 - Present by Erik V. R. Rangno Pdf

This volume focuses on a variety of topics, from the violence of war and the struggle for civil rights to the social impact of technology and the moral significance of money. A concise, engaging guide to American contemporary literature, this volume provi

Author : Josep M. Armengol
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 182 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2024-05-08
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9783031533495

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Rewriting White Masculinities in Contemporary Fiction and Film by Josep M. Armengol Pdf

Author : Gilbert H. Muller
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
Page : 292 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2024-05-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0813129346

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New Strangers in Paradise: The Immigrant Experience and Contemporary American Fiction by Gilbert H. Muller Pdf

Author : S. Halldorson
Publisher : Springer
Page : 223 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2007-12-09
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780230609785

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The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction by S. Halldorson Pdf

This book sets out to write nothing short of a new theory of the heroic for today's world. It delves into the "why" of the hero as a natural companion piece to the "how" of the hero as written by Northrop Frye and Joseph Campbell over half a century ago. The novels of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo serve as an anchor to the theory as it challenges our notions of what is heroic about nymphomaniacs, Holocaust survivors, spurious academics, cult followers, terrorists, celebrities, photographers and writers of novels who all attempt to claim the right to be "hero."