Books by Paul Varner

The Historical Dictionary of Romanticism in Literature takes a close and comprehensive look at romanticism in literature through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography.

When the earliest filmgoers watched The Great Train Robbery in 1903, many of them shrieked in terror at the very last clip when one of the outlaws turns directly toward the camera and fires a gun, seemingly, directly at the audience. The puff of smoke was sudden and it was hand colored so that it looked real. Today, we can look back at that primitive movie and see all the elements of what would evolve into the Western genre. Perhaps it is the Western's early origins_The Great Train Robbery was the first narrative, commercial movie_or its formulaic yet entertaining structure that has made the Western so popular. Whatever the case may be, with the recent success of films like 3:10 to Yuma and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, the Western appears to be in no danger of disappearing. The story of the western is told in The A to Z of Westerns in Cinema through a chronology, a bibliography, and an introductory essay. However, it is the hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on cinematographers; composers; producers; films like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Dances With Wolves, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, High Noon, The Magnificent Seven, The Searchers, Tombstone, and Unforgiven; such actors as Gene Autry, Kirk Douglas, Clint Eastwood, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, and John Wayne; and directors like John Ford and Sergio Leone that will have you reaching for this book again and again.

The Beat Movement was one of the most radical and innovative literary and arts movements of the 20th century, and the history of the Beat Movement is still being written in the early years of the 21st century. Unlike other kinds of literary and artistic movements, the Beat Movement is self-perpetuating. After the 1950s generation, headlined by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, a new generation arose in the 1960s led by writers such as Diane Wakoski, Anne Waldman, and poets from the East Side Scene. In the 1970s and 1980s writers from the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church and contributors to World magazine continued the movement. The 1980s and 1990s Language Movement saw itself as an outgrowth and progression of previous Beat aesthetics. Today poets and writers in San Francisco still gather at City Lights Bookstore and in Boulder at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and continue the movement. It is now a postmodern movement and probably would be unrecognizable to the earliest Beats. It may even be in the process of finally shedding the name Beat. But the Movement continues.The Historical Dictionary of the Beat Movement covers the movement's history through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on significant people, themes, critical issues, and the most significant novels, poems, and volumes of poetry and prose that have formed the Beat canon. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Beat Movement.

When in 1902 Owen Wister, a member of the Eastern blueblood aristocracy and friend of novelist Henry James, became a best-selling novelist with the publication of The Virginian, few readers would have guessed that a new kind of American literature was being born. While Owen Wister was enjoying his success, Edwin S. Porter in New Jersey was filming the first cinema Western The Great Train Robbery, which would usher in a new era both of movies in general and of Western movies in particular. Both events would lead to a century of cultural fascination with stories of the old West. The Historical Dictionary of Westerns in Literature tells the story of the Western through a chronology, a bibliography, an introductory essay, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on authors such as Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Max Brand, Clarence Mulford, Ernest Haycox, Luke Short, Dorothy Johnson, Louis L'Amour, and Cormac McCarthy.