M. Thomas Inge

William Faulkner's novels and short stories comprise a penetrating view of the divided loyalties, hypocrisies, injustices, and brutalities that were the inheritance of the post-Reconstruction South. Renowned scholar M. Thomas Inge complements a concise text with more than a hundred rarely seen photos and illustrations, making William Faulkner both an inviting introduction to the life and work of this master of modern fiction and an indispensable book of vital interest to readers and scholars.

Overlook Illustrated Lives

William Faulkner

Flannery O'Connor once noted, "The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down." Her railroading metaphor wittily captures much of the respect and unease Faulkner's example brought the worldwide community of authors. Few other writers have exerted as profound an influence on literature as Faulkner. Prominent literary scholar M. Thomas Inge documents the scope of his influence in the twentieth century through the words of those writers themselves. This collection of essays offers a survey attempting to capture exactly what Faulkner meant to his literary peers and colleagues both in the United States and abroad. Inge has combed essays, articles, reviews, letters, and comments written by over forty novelists, poets, and playwrights about Faulkner's fiction and the power of his literary accomplishment. Many major American writers sound off here, as well as important figures from France, England, Japan, and South America. Some speak about his technical virtuosity and how this expertise has directly influenced them, and others express the difficulties of trying to escape his example. A few even criticize him for what they see as artistic failures. The variety of responses demonstrate, in any case, that Faulkner created an unavoidable power in his own time and remains a permanent force in literature.

Writers on William Faulkner and His Influence

The Dixie Limited

Dennis Hall

Contains fifty-eight articles that provide information about various forms, genres, or themes of popular culture, and includes illustrations, photo essays, a chronological survey of each topic's history, and a comprehensive index.

The Greenwood Guide to American Popular Culture: Jazz through propaganda

Looks at a wide variety of popular American fiction genres, including comic books, mystery novels, historical fiction, fantasy and science fiction, and westerns.

Handbook of American Popular Literature

This handbook seeks to assemble in one place the basic bibliographical data needed to begin the study of most of the major areas of popular culture. Each chapter provides a brief chronological survey of the development of the medium or topic; a critical guide in essay form to the standard reference works, bibliographies, histories, critical studies, and journals; a description of research centers and collections of primary and secondary materials; and a bibliography of works cited in the text. The revised edition includes new material and chapters on topics such as business, catalogs, computers, dance, fashion, gardening, and graffiti. ISBN 0-313-25406-0 (set: lib. bdg.) $150.00 (For use only in the library).

Handbook of American Popular Culture

Jackson R. Bryer

Maurice Duke

Provides bibliographic essays for American writers from Anne Bradstreet, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Edith Wharton to Gertrude Stein, Eudora Welty, and Sylvia Plath

Bibliographical Essays

American Women Writers

Essays on Humor, Literature, and the Popular Arts

Perspectives on American Culture

The Greenwood Guide to American Popular Culture: Pulps and dime novels through young adult fiction

This anthology is intended as a tribute to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on the occasion of its centenial. It contains criticism covering the entire span of its lively existence, from early impressionistic reviews and commentary through the great debate of the mid-20th century, down to the present decade. Also included are background essays on Mark Twain as a representative American figure, and the composition of the novel. Discussions of the illustrations for the first edition and the various film adaptations are covered in an appendix. An annotated checklist of criticism concludes the volume. As a whole it serves as an overview of the critical past and a prelude to another 100 years of commentary to come.

A Centennial Selection

Huck Finn Among the Critics

Will Eisner’s innovations in the comics, especially the comic book and the graphic novel, as well as his devotion to comics analysis, make him one of comics’ first true auteurs and the cartoonist so revered and influential that cartooning’s highest honor is named after him. His newspaper feature The Spirit (1940–1952) introduced the now-common splash page to the comic book, as well as dramatic angles and lighting effects that were influenced by, and influenced in turn, the conventions of film noir. Even in his tales of crime fighting, Eisner’s writing focused on everyday details of city life and on contemporary social issues. In 1976, he premiered A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories, a collection of realist cartoon stories that paved the way for the modern “graphic novel.” His 1985 book, Comics and Sequential Art, was among the first sustained analyses and overviews of the comics form, articulating theories of the art’s grammar and structure. Eisner’s studio nurtured such comics legends as Jules Feiffer, Wally Wood, Lou Fine, and Jack Cole. Will Eisner: Conversations, edited by comics scholar M. Thomas Inge, collects the best interviews with Eisner (1917–2005) from 1965 to 2004. Taken together, the interviews cover the breadth of Eisner’s career with in-depth information about his creation of The Spirit and other well-known comic book characters, his devotion to the educational uses of the comics medium, and his contributions to the development of the graphic novel.

Conversations

Will Eisner

A collection of interviews that reflect on the life and work of cartoonist Charles M. Schulz.

Charles M. Schulz

The Merrill Studies in Light in August

Robert Emory Blackwell Professor of the Humanities M Thomas Inge

Edward J. Piacentino

The humor of the Old South -- tales, almanac entries, turf reports, historical sketches, gentlemen's essays on outdoor sports, profiles of local characters -- flourished between 1830 and 1860. The genre's popularity and influence can be traced in the works of major southern writers such as William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Harry Crews, as well as in contemporary popular culture focusing on the rural South. This collection of essays includes some of the past twenty five years' best writing on the subject, as well as ten new works bringing fresh insights and original approaches to the subject. A number of the essays focus on well known humorists such as Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson Jones Hooper, William Tappan Thompson, and George Washington Harris, all of whom have long been recognized as key figures in Southwestern humor. Other chapters examine the origins of this early humor, in particular selected poems of William Henry Timrod and Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," which anticipate the subject matter, character types, structural elements, and motifs that would become part of the Southwestern tradition. Renditions of "Sleepy Hollow" were later echoed in sketches by William Tappan Thompson, Joseph Beckman Cobb, Orlando Benedict Mayer, Francis James Robinson, and William Gilmore Simms. Several essays also explore antebellum southern humor in the context of race and gender. This literary legacy left an indelible mark on the works of later writers such as Mark Twain and William Faulkner, whose works in a comic vein reflect affinities and connections to the rich lode of materials initially popularized by the Southwestern humorists.

The Humor of the Old South

A collected selection of reviews of William Faulkner's writings from 1926 to 1962.

The Contemporary Reviews

Offering a comprehensive view of the South's literary landscape, past and present, this volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture celebrates the region's ever-flourishing literary culture and recognizes the ongoing evolution of the southern literary canon. As new writers draw upon and reshape previous traditions, southern literature has broadened and deepened its connections not just to the American literary mainstream but also to world literatures--a development thoughtfully explored in the essays here. Greatly expanding the content of the literature section in the original Encyclopedia, this volume includes 31 thematic essays addressing major genres of literature; theoretical categories, such as regionalism, the southern gothic, and agrarianism; and themes in southern writing, such as food, religion, and sexuality. Most striking is the fivefold increase in the number of biographical entries, which introduce southern novelists, playwrights, poets, and critics. Special attention is given to contemporary writers and other individuals who have not been widely covered in previous scholarship.

Volume 9: Literature

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture

Thomas Daniel Young

An Essay and a Bibliography

Donald Davidson

Essays on Eco's The Name of the Rose

Naming the Rose

The original essays gathered in this book make a beginning at exploring the cultural significance of The Name of the Rose in terms of its backgrounds and literary contexts. Eco's novel is examined in the light of several of the traditions from which it draws: theories of detective fiction, comedy, postmodernism, the apocalypse, semiotics, and literary criticism. The authors from a variety of language disciplines frequently draw on Eco's own scholarly commentaries to elucidate the novel. The Name of the Rose was published in English in the United States in 1983 and remained on the best-seller list for forty weeks. Paperback publication rights brought the highest price ever paid for a translation, and in 1986 it became a major motion picture. Written by a distinguished professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, the novel was an immediate bestseller in Italy in 1980 and was subsequently translated into twenty languages to universal acclaim. The question all this raises is, how can such a novel be so popular--a detective set in a medieval monastery, which entertains at the same time as it deals with theology, history, politics, humanism, comedy, literary criticism, and just about everything else that makes up culture and society? Is it possible that a popular piece of fiction, accessible to general readers, can also address complex and profound ideas? This volume of essays on the celebrated novel is the first of several books to be written in appreciation of Eco's remarkable accomplishment. It has the distinction also of including a foreword written by Eco himself in response to the essays, certainly one of the few times when the author has agreed to critique his critics. In addition, this collection contains a bibliography of Eco criticism. Just as The Name of the Rose has something for everyone, so too does this book of critical essays. Scholar, teacher, student, and general reader alike will benefit from the light it casts on a contemporary literary phenomenon.

M. Thomas Inge

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