F. Scott Fitzgerald

Tony Tanner

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby brilliantly captures the disillusion of a society obsessed with wealth and status. Young, handsome and fabulously rich, Jay Gatsby appears to have it all, yet he yearns for the one thing that will always be out of his reach, the absence of which renders his life of glittering parties and bright young things ultimately hollow. Gatsby's tragic pursuit of his dream is often cited as the Great American Novel.

The Great Gatsby

A collection of British and American tales of maritime adventure, including works by authors from Joseph Conrad and Washington Irving to William Faulkner and Peter Ustinov

The Oxford Book of Sea Stories

Analyzes each of Austen's novels, from Northanger Abbey to Sandition, describes her portrayal of society and education, and discusses her use of language

Jane Austen

Tony Tanner's classic text on Jane Austen addresses the issues that have always occupied the author's most perceptive critics and offers a stimulating analysis of Austen's novels which is now regarded as one of the finest introductions to the author. This revised edition features a new Preface by leading Romantic scholar Marilyn Gaull who examines Tanner's background and places the original work in context, explaining why a reissue of this highly influential text is timely.

This book is about the relationship of the American writer to his land and language - to the 'scene' and the 'sign', to the natural landscape and the inscriptions imposed upon it by men. Among the questions considered in the first section of the book are how does American Romantic writing differ from European; what are the peculiar problems faced by the American artist, and what roles does he adopt to tackle them; what kind of writing results when authors as different as Henry Adams and Mark Twain lament the vanishing of an earlier America, or when Adams and Henry James review their complex relationship to their homeland, or when W. D. Howells and Stephen Crane seek to define their themes in a specifically American setting. The second section of the book examines similar concerns in a number of contemporary writers, notably Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, John DeLillo, and William Gass.

Essays on 19th and 20th Century American Literature

Scenes of Nature, Signs of Men

Malevolent, mysterious, vast, the ocean has always sparked our fascination and sense of adventure, giving rise to a remarkable vein of narrative deftly mined here by editor Tony Tanner. In the twenty-seven tales of The Oxford Book of the Sea, masters of the art tell of men on ships, grappling with themselves, their fellow sailors, and the trials of the sea: from hurricane winds to the frustrating calm, from swirling currents to rampaging whales. Here is the work of Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Stephen Crane, C.S. Forester, Ernest Hemingway, and of course Conrad. Along with the essential stories come unexpected gems by writers not known for their seafaring bent such as William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, and Edgar Allan Poe. Some of the finest writers in the English language have been drawn to the subject of life at sea, with its dangers, loneliness, and triumphs. The Oxford Book of the Sea gathers together some of the best examples of the form, offering moving prose, fascinating insight into the human condition, and the simple pleasure of tales of high adventure.

A collection of essays by the late Tony Tanner on a wide range of key American authors.

American Literature from Emerson to DeLillo

The American Mystery

A Selection of Critical Essays

Henry James

His interpretation encompasses the role of women, the structure of the family, social mores, and the history of sexuality.

Contract and Transgression

Adultery in the Novel

Joseph Conrad, Typhoon, The Secret Sharer, The Shadow-Line

Dr Tanner investigates American literature with regards to wonder and cultivated naivety.

Naivety and Reality in American Literature

The Reign of Wonder

Venecia está presente en la obra de Melville, Lord Byron, Ruskin, Henry James, Marcel Proust, Hofmannsthal, Ezra Pound, Rilke, Mann, Satre, es decir, en buena parte de los autores fundamentales para entender la literatura moderna y el mundo en el que estamos. Venecia es un mundo de deseo, así lo entendieron estos autores, también de los más extremos contrastes, la ciudad de las "piedras" de Ruskin, el mosaico de Proust, el amor y la muerte de Mann. La historia y la materialidad de Venecia, su arquitectura, sus pinturas y sus pintores, sus dirigentes, el mar y el mármol, los jardines y las plazas, se articulan en las obras de todos ellos de tal manera que pensamos en una Venecia capaz de "crear", por así decirlo, una literatura original y personal. ¿Hubieran escrito todos ellos de la misma manera a como lo han hecho de no existir Venecia? Tony Tanner ha estudiado con minuciosidad y la brillantez más extrema las relaciones que mantuvieron con Venecia, las que mantuvieron entre sí, el diálogo, explícito en ocasiones, oculto otras veces, que está en el fondo de sus obras. El libro, de una riqueza difícilmente superable, es ya un clásico no sólo de la crítica, también del pensamiento contemporáneo. Venecia es a la vez el refugio-cielo del arte (el desván de Tiziano) y lugar de lo suprimido, de lo agitado, de la vida sensual oprimida, borrada, que subvierte y se aleja al mismo tiempo del enclave artístico. Como lugar y figura, Venecia parece ser notoria e increíblemente doble, volviéndose constantemente en su contrario y deseando o precipitando humores exactamente opuestos: satisfacción y pérdida; iluminación y desolación; un sentido de gloria, plenitud y apoteosis que da lugar a sentimientos de abandono, ausencia y disminución; el abandono espiritual en lo sensual y el esplendor convertido en miseria. Así fue para Byron y Ruskin, también para Henry James, así será para Proust. Y, de forma un tanto complicada, también lo será para Hofmannsthal.

Venecia deseada

If there is one city that might be said to embody both reason and desire, it would surely be Venice: a thousand-year triumph of rational legislation, aesthetic and sensual self-expression, and self-creation--powerful, lovely, serene. Unique in so many ways, Venice is also unique in its relation to writing. London has Dickens, Paris has Balzac, Saint Petersburg has Dostoevsky, Dublin has Joyce, but there is simply no comparable writer for, or out of, Venice. Venice effectively disappeared from history altogether in 1797 after its defeat by Napoleon. From then on, it seemed to exist as a curiously marooned spectacle. Literally marooned--the city mysteriously growing out of the sea, the beautiful stone impossibly floating on water--but temporally marooned as well, stagnating outside history. Yet as spectacle, as the beautiful city par excellence, the city of art, the city as art and as spectacular example, as the greatest and richest republic in the history of the world, now declined and fallen, Venice became an important site for the European imagination. Watery, dark, silent, a place of sensuality and secrecy; of masks and masquerading; of an always possibly treacherous beauty; of Desdemona and Iago, Shylock, Volpone; of conspiracy and courtesans in Otway; an obvious setting for many Gothic novels--Venice is not written from the inside but variously appropriated from without. Venice--the place, the name, the dream--seems to lend itself to a whole variety of appreciations, recuperations, and and hallucinations. In decay and decline, yet saturated with secret sexuality--suggesting a heady compound of death and desire--Venice becomes for many writers what is was for Byron: both "the greenest island of my imagination" and a "sea-sodom." It also, as this book tries to show, plays a crucial role in the development of modern writing. Tony Tanner skillfully lays before us the many ways in which this dreamlike city has been summoned up, depicted, dramatized--then rediscovered or transfigured in selected writings through the years.

Venice Desired

Examines the American authors short stories and novels and discusses his place in modern literature

Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon is now recognized as a major contemporary novelist and perhaps the most important American writer since Melville. His work is both richly imaginative and amazingly erudite and can be compared, in its complexity, linguistic playfulness and experimentation and wealth of allusion, to the work of James Joyce. Aspects of history, psychology, technology and science, cultural and political movements, problems of identity and society and the status and function of fiction and narrative in the modern world are all dramatized with extraordinary wit and power. Tony Tanner provides a brief, comprehensive introduction to his work. Against the background of Pynchon the man, this book, originally published in 1982, examines in detail his early short stories (some of which are not easily accessible) and offers a guide to the reading of his novels, V., The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. Many of Pynchon’s recurrent themes, from entropy and information theory to his interest in the operations and divisions of power in the world since the Second World War, are considered. Finally, Tony Tanner places Pynchon and his work in a broader cultural and literary context.

Tony Tanner

About

Books

Join the club