Books in the Studies in Major Literary Authors series

Considers the processes through which Emily Dickinson's work has been edited in the twentieth century and how such editorial processes contribute to the production of Dickinson as author. This work covers the posthumous editing of her handwritten manuscripts, and explores what a Dickinson poem may be, and how we may approach such an object.

Arguing that Raymond Carver merits consideration as a major American writer, this text reveals his pivotal role in American minimalist fiction. It contextualizes Carver's work in terms of the time and place of its construction and represention to reveal it as fiction that transcends the lower middle class North American relity that it documents.

Readers have long noted affinities and contrasts between Merrill and Yeats. This examination of the nature of this lifelong poetic relationship draws on both little-known material and an examination of Merrill's better-known writing to establish the ways in which Merrill contends with the older poet's haunting personality and poetic accomplishment.

Argues that Tennyson's war poems reflect image patterns of the Iliad and the Aeneid, and reinvigorate the heroic ethos that informs these and other ancient texts.

Provides an investigation of the double trope as a central area of Dicken's writings in their relation to Victorian culture, using this examination of the double to shed light on such issues as urban space and imperialism in the Victorian era.

This book traces Stoddard's emergence as a writer in the 1850s, her conflict-ridden relationships with the writers associated with the genteel tradition, and her efforts to negotiate the boundaries of Victorian culture in the USA.

Arguing that Orwell's fiction and non-fiction weigh the benefits and costs of adopting a doubled perspective, this title illustrates how decency follows this perspective. It shows how Orwell's characters' ability to treat others decently depends upon the characters' relative capacities for doubleness.

Explores the nature of Melville's relations to his reader in Moby Dick, arguing that Melville and Ishmael are so dazzled and seduced by the Ahab's charismatic charm that they are unable to see Ahab's character clearly.

Combining literary analysis with cultural criticism, this book highlights the aspect of our nation's iconic development in statuary. It investigates the connection between the contested nineteenth-century American monument tradition and one of the nation's most revered authors.

Looks at the origins of the modernist movement, linking gender, modernism and the literary, before considering the bearing these discourses had on Djuna Barnes' writing. This work explores the editorial changes that T S Eliot made to the manuscript of "Nightwood", as well as the revisions of the early drafts initiated by Emily Holmes Coleman.

Re-reading Leaves of Grass within the context of a nineteenth-century evangelical culture of conversion, this book uncovers how the sacred seductions of Whitman's poetry sought to redeem the nation through the ecstatic conversions of its readers.

Offers a cultural history of Stein's rise to fame and the function of literary celebrity in America from 1910 to 1935. By examining the ways the popular portrayed Stein in her work, this book shows that there was an intimate relationship between literary modernism and mainstream culture and that modernist writers and texts were well-known.

Studying on the subject of Dickens and work, this book argues that, rather than engaging with work as an abstract, quasi-religious and entirely benign value, Dickens' writings demonstrate the varied ways in which it shapes gender identity and personality.

Oscar Wilde was a consumer modernist. His modernist aesthetics drove him into the heart of the mass culture industries of 1890s London, particularly the journalism and popular theatre industries.

Looks beyond the received criticism and stereotypes attached to Philip K Dick and his work and shows that Philip K Dick is a serious and relevant philosophical and cultural thinker whose writing offer us important insights into contemporary digital culture. This title asks two uncharted 'Dickian' questions: What is reality? And, What is human?

Examines the representations of homosexuality and homoeroticism in Joseph Conrad's fiction. This book traces Conrad's representations of homosexuality and homoeroticism, beginning with the Malay works and ending with "The Shadow Line".

Examines a selection of G K Chesterton's novels, poetry, and literary criticism and outlines the distinctive philosophy of history that emerges from these writings. This book concludes that Chesterton's emphasis on locality is the hallmark of his historical philosophy in that it blends the concepts of free will, specificity, and creatureliness.

An overview of McCarthy's published work and includes: the short stories he published as a student, his novels, stage play and TV film script. This book locates him as a icocolastic writer, engaged in deconstructing America's vision of itself as a nation with an exceptionalist role in the world. It also outlines his personal background.

Presents an ecocritical reading of DeLillo's novels in an attempt to mediate between the seemingly incompatible influences of postmodernism and environmentalism. This title argues that although DeLillo is responding to and engaging with a postmodern culture of simulacra, his novels do not reflect a postmodernist theory of the "end of nature."

Provides a critique of Paul Auster's writings.

Analyzes the relationship between race and genre in four of Toni Morrison's novels: "The Bluest Eye", "Tar Baby", "Jazz", and "Beloved". This book argues how Morrison's novels revise conventional generic forms such as bildungsroman, folktales, slave narratives, and the formal realism of the novel itself.

Examines Charles Dickens' weekly family magazine "Household Words" in order to develop a picture of how the journal negotiated, asserted and simultaneously deconstructed Englishness as a unified (and sometimes unifying) mode of expression.

Examines the conflict of aesthetics and politics in "The Diary of Virginia Woolf". As a modernist writer concerned with contemporary aesthetic theories, Woolf experimented with limiting the representative nature of writing. At the same time, as a feminist, Woolf wanted to incorporate her political interests in her fiction.

Reassesses Pynchon's literary career in order to explain the central role played by the racialization of American culture in the postmodernist deconstruction of subjectivity and literary authority and in the crisis in white liberal culture. This book charts the evolution of these cultural transformations from Pynchon's short stories.

Examining the ways F Scott Fitzgerald portrayed spectator sports as working to help structure ideologies of class, community and nationhood, this book shows how narratives of attending sports and being a 'fan' cultivate communities of spectatorship.

Presents interpretations of Cormac McCarthy's characters as simple, antinomian, and non-psychological; and of his landscapes as unrelated to the violent arcs of often orphaned and socially detached characters. This book talks about how McCarthy's books only appear to be stories of masculine heroics, and expressions of misogynistic fear.