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26 results in Literary Criticism in Perspective

Page 1 of 2

The Critical Reception of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
  • Sherlock Holmes and Beyond
  • Laurence W. Mazzeno
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    10 January 2024
    Print publication:
    20 June 2023
  • Examines both academic and popular assessments of Conan Doyle's work, giving pride of place to the Holmes stories and their adaptations, and also attending to the wide range of his published work.

Reading Abolition
  • The Critical Reception of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass
  • Brian Yothers
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    21 February 2023
    Print publication:
    01 December 2016
  • A pathbreaking consideration of the intertwined critical responses to Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass, giants of abolitionist literature.

Melville's Mirrors
  • Literary Criticism and America's Most Elusive Author
  • Brian Yothers
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    11 February 2023
    Print publication:
    01 November 2011
  • An accessible and highly readable guide to the story of Melville criticism as it has developed over the past century and a half.

American Icon
  • Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in Critical and Cultural Context
  • Robert Beuka
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    11 February 2023
    Print publication:
    03 October 2011
  • How and why Fitzgerald's novel, initially called a failure, has come to be considered a masterwork of American literature and part of the fabric of the culture.

The Critical Reception of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises
  • Peter Hays
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    10 February 2023
    Print publication:
    15 November 2011
  • Changing critical views of Hemingway's great novel of the Lost Generation, from publication to the present.

The Critical Life of Toni Morrison
  • Susan Neal Mayberry
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    14 January 2023
    Print publication:
    15 July 2021
  • The first book to trace the critical reception of the great African American woman writer, attending not only to her fiction but to her nonfiction and critical writings.

Mark Twain under Fire
  • Reception and Reputation, Criticism and Controversy, 1851–2015
  • Joe B. Fulton
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    02 June 2021
    Print publication:
    15 July 2018
  • Tracks the genesis and evolution of Twain's reputation as a writer, revealing how and why the writer has been under fire 'since the advent of his career.'

At War with The Red Badge of Courage
  • A Critical and Cultural History
  • Kevin J. Hayes
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 November 2020
    Print publication:
    15 December 2020
  • The story of the critical reception of Crane's great Civil War novel from its publication to the present, with particular attention to the effects of later wars on that reception.

Willa Cather
  • The Critical Conversation
  • Kelsey Squire
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    06 October 2020
    Print publication:
    01 June 2020
  • A contextualizing overview of the polarized critical reception of Willa Cather, one of the pre-eminent US authors of the twentieth-century.

Ezra Pound and the Career of Modern Criticism
  • Professional Attention
  • Michael Coyle, Roxana Preda
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    17 July 2019
    Print publication:
    10 September 2018
  • This first book-length study of Pound criticism investigates not just what critics have had to say about Pound but also why they have asked the questions they have asked.

Mark Twain under Fire
  • Reception and Reputation, Criticism and Controversy, 1851-2015
  • Joe B. Fulton
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    09 April 2019
    Print publication:
    15 November 2016
  • Threatened by a rival editor brandishing a double-barreled shotgun, young Samuel Clemens had his first taste of literary criticism. Clemens began his long writing career penning satirical articles forhis brother's newspaper in Hannibal, Missouri. His humor delighted everyone except his targets, and it would not be the last time his writing provoked threats of "dissection, tomahawking, libel, andgetting his head shot off." Clemens adopted the name Mark Twain while living in the Nevada Territory, where his caustic comedy led to angry confrontations, a challenge to a duel, and a subsequent flight. Nursing his wounded ego in California, Twain vowed to develop a reputation that would "stand fire" and in the process became the classic American writer.
    Mark Twain under Fire tracks the genesis and evolution of Twain's reputation as a writer: his reception as a humorist, his "return fire" on genteel critics, and the development of academic criticism. As a history of Twain criticism, the book draws on English and foreign-language scholarship. Fulton discusses the forces and ideas that have influenced criticism, revealing how and why Mark Twain has been "under fire" fromthe advent of his career to the present day, when his masterpiece Huckleberry Finn remains one of America's most frequently banned books.

    Joe B. Fulton is Professor of English at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He has published four previous books on Mark Twain.

The Critical Reception of James Baldwin, 1963-2010
  • An Honest Man and a Good Writer
  • Conseula Francis
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    09 March 2018
    Print publication:
    01 April 2014
  • James Baldwin is a widely taught and anthologized author. His short story "Sonny's Blues" remains a perennial favorite in literature anthologies, and all of his essay collections and novels are still in print. His first essay collection, Notes of a Native Son, is a seminal work that led a new generation of African American writers from beneath the shadow of Richard Wright. The Fire Next Time is widely held as one of the most profound and accurate articulations of black consciousness during the Civil Rights movement. It is difficult to imagine teaching a survey of African American literature or considering the development of black intellectual thought in the twentieth century without mentioning Baldwin. For more than half a century, readers and critics alike have agreed that Baldwin is a major African American writer. What they do not agree on is why. Because of his artistic and intellectual complexity, his work resists easy categorization, and Baldwin scholarship, consequently, spans the critical horizon. Conseula Francis's book examines the major divisions in Baldwin criticism, paying particular attention to the wayeach critical period defines Baldwin and his work for its own purposes. Conseula Francis is Associate Professor of English and Director of African American Studies at the College of Charleston.

Following Faulkner
  • The Critical Response to Yoknapatawpha's Architect
  • Taylor Hagood
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 April 2017
    Print publication:
    15 March 2017
  • William Faulkner seems to have sprung a full-blown genius from a remote part of the American South. Yet Faulkner spent much of his life striving to emulate and overshadow - both as a writer and as a person - his great-grandfather and namesake, Colonel William Falkner, a dueling, railroad-building, soldiering figure who loomed not just as a legend in Faulkner's family and community but also as a literary forebear, a published novelist, travel writer, and poet. Looking back on his career, Faulkner would mention that early on he had ridden his great-grandfather's coattails, but by the mid-twentieth century it was clear that it was the great-grandson who was leading the literary world: readers, young writers of fiction, and literary critics were following him as one who had found extraordinary ways to capture and express the most challenging aspects of modern life. Taylor Hagood's book centers on the concept of following to examine how Faulkner's work has been analyzed, elucidated,and promoted by a massive body of scholarly work spanning over seven decades. It narrates the development of Faulkner criticism, taking as its premise the idea that Faulkner forges a fiery path through modernism and into postmodernism that literary critics have been constantly rushing to follow.

    Taylor Hagood is Associate Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University. His book Faulkner: Writer of Disability (LSU Press, 2014) won the C. Hugh Holman Award for Best Book in Southern Literary Studies in 2015.

The Critics and Hemingway, 1924-2014
  • Shaping an American Literary Icon
  • Laurence W. Mazzeno
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2016
    Print publication:
    21 December 2015
  • Hemingway burst on the literary scene in the 1920s with spare, penetrating short stories and brilliant novels. Soon he was held as a standard for modern writers. Meanwhile, he used his celebrity to create a persona like the stoic, macho heroes of his fiction. After a decline during the 1930s and 1940s, he came roaring back with The Old Man and the Sea in 1952. Two years later he received the Nobel Prize.
    While his popularity waxed and waned during his lifetime, Hemingway's reputation among scholars remained strong as long as traditional scholarship dominated. New approaches beginning in the 1960s brought a sea change, however, finding grave fault with his work and making him a figure ripe for vilification. Yet during this time scholarship on him continued to appear. His works still sell well, and several are staples on high-school and college syllabi. A new scholarly edition of his letters is drawing prominent attention, and there is a resurgence in scholarly attention to-and approbation for-his work. Tracing Hemingway's critical fortunes tells us something about what we value in literature and why reputations rise and fall as scholars find new ways to examine and interpret creative work.

    Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University. Among other books, he has written volumes on Austen, Dickens, Tennyson, Updike, and Matthew Arnold for Camden House's Literary Criticism in Perspective series.

Becoming John Updike
  • Critical Reception, 1958-2010
  • Laurence W. Mazzeno
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 May 2013
    Print publication:
    01 April 2013
  • When John Updike died in 2009, tributes from the literary establishment were immediate and fulsome. However, no one reading reviews of Updike's work in the late 1960s would have predicted that kind of praise for a man who was known then as a brilliant stylist who had nothing to say. What changed? Why? And what is likely to be his legacy? These are the questions that "Becoming John Updike" pursues by examining the journalistic and academic response to his writings. Several things about Updike's career make a reception study appropriate. First, he was prolific: he began publishing fiction and essays in 1956, published his first book in 1958, and from then on, brought out at least one new book each year. Second, his books were reviewed widely - usually in major American newspapers and magazines, and often in foreign ones as well. Third, Updike quickly became a darling of academics; the first book about his work was published in 1967, less than a decade after his own first book. More than three dozen books and hundreds of articles of academic criticism have been devoted to Updike. The present volume will appeal to the continuing interest in Updike's writing among academics and general readers alike. Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University. Among other books, he has written volumes on Austen, Dickens, Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold for Camden House's Literary Criticism in Perspective series.

Approaching Emily Dickinson
  • Critical Currents and Crosscurrents since 1960
  • Fred D. White
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 June 2008
  • When Klaus Lubbers's meticulously detailed 'Emily Dickinson: The Critical Revolution' appeared in 1968, examining Dickinson criticism up to 1962, a second revolution in Dickinson criticism was already gathering force, as a new generation of scholars representing a wide spectrum of critical perspectives began reassessing the poet's life and work. In the intervening forty years, approximately 100 books about Dickinson and her oeuvre have appeared, making her one of the most extensively studied American poets in history. 'Approaching Emily Dickinson' provides an objective examination of that vast body of scholarship. It gives detailed attention to the principal trends in Dickinson scholarship during the past half-century: biographical studies; feminist perspectives on the poet's life and work; rhetorical and stylistic analyses; textual studies of the bound and unbound fascicles and the so-called worksheet drafts; studies of Dickinson's social and cultural milieu, including influences on her spirituality, and of her theories of poetry. Fred White also examines Dickinson's artistic reception - an area of ever-growing fascination, not only among Dickinson scholars but among artists, creative writers, dramatists, and musicians for whom Dickinson's genius has proven to be a powerful conduit for insights into the human condition. A fundamental research tool for both scholars and students, 'Approaching Emily Dickinson' also enables fruitful comparisons both among and within the different critical and artistic perspectives. Fred D. White is professor of English at Santa Clara University. His studies of Emily Dickinson have been published in 'College Literature' and in the 'Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson.'

Jane Austen
  • Two Centuries of Criticism
  • Laurence W. Mazzeno
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    02 May 2011
  • Among the most important English novelists, Jane Austen is unusual because she is esteemed not only by academics but by the reading public. Her novels continue to sell well, and films adapted from her works enjoy strong box-office success. The trajectory of Austen criticism is intriguing, especially when one compares it to that of other nineteenth-century English writers. At least partly because she was a woman in the early nineteenth century, she was long neglected by critics, hardly considered a major figure in English literature until well into the twentieth century, a hundred years after her death. But consequently she escaped the reaction against Victorianism that did so much to hurt the reputation of Dickens, Tennyson, Arnold, and others. How she rose to prominence among academic critics - and has retained her position through the constant shifting of academic and critical trends - is a story worth telling, as it suggests not only something about Austen's artistry but also about how changes in critical perspective can radically alter a writer's reputation. Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University, Reading, Pennsylvania.

The Critical Response to Robert Musil's 'The Man without Qualities'
  • Tim Mehigan
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    21 July 2003
  • The Austrian writer Robert Musil ranks among the foremost novelists of the 20th century. Despite a series of lesser but well-regarded shorter works, his literary reputation rests almost entirely on his novel 'Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften' (The Man without Qualities), a life-work in the truest sense, which became the focus of all his energies and thinking from 1924 until his death in 1942. This study analyzes the principal trends in scholarship on the novel from the 1960s to the present. It contrasts earlier criticism, which foregrounded the eponymous central character's search for identity against the background of subject theory or mysticism, with more recent criticism, which has focused on aesthetic and ethical approaches to the novel within the broader context of theories of value. A focal chapter in the study centers on the persistent difficulty critics have encountered with the idea of 'Eigenschaftslosigkeit', the state of being without qualities named in the novel's title. Tim Mehigan is Associate Professor of German and Head of the Department of Germanic Studies and Russian at the University of Melbourne.

Arthur Schnitzler and Twentieth-Century Criticism
  • Andrew C. Wisely
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    28 November 2003
  • Schnitzler, one of the most prolific Austrian writers of the 20th century, ruthlessly dissected his society's erotic posturing and phobias about sex and death. His most penetrating analyses include 'Lieutenant Gustl,' the first stream-of-consciousness novella in German; 'Reigen,' a devastating cycle of one-acts mapping the social limits of a sexual daisy-chain; and 'Der Weg ins Freie,' a novel that combines a love story with a discussion of the roadblocks facing Austria's Jews. Today, his popularity is reflected by new editions and translations and by adaptations for theater, television, and film by artists such as Tom Stoppard and Stanley Kubrick. This book examinesSchnitzler reception up to 2000, beginning with the journalistic reception of the early plays. Before being suspended by a decade of Nazism, criticism in the 1920s and 30s emphasized Schnitzler's determinism and decadence. Not until the early 60s was humanist scholarship able to challenge this verdict by pointing out Schnitzler's ethical indictment of impressionism in the late novellas. During the same period, Schnitzler, whom Freud considered his literary "Doppelgänger," was often subjected to Freudian psychoanalytical criticism; but by the 80s, scholarship was citing his own thoroughgoing objections to such categories. Since the 70s, Schnitzler's remonstrance toward the Austrian establishment has been examined by social historians and feminist critics alike, and the recently completed ten-volume edition of Schnitzler's diary has met with vibrant interest. Andrew C. Wisely is associate professor of German at Baylor University.

Goethe's 'Werther' and the Critics
  • Bruce Duncan
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 July 2005
  • When Goethe's first novel, 'Die Leiden des jungen Werther' (The Sorrows of Young Werther) appeared in 1774, it caused a sensation that is hard to exaggerate. 'Werther fever' gripped not just Germany, but Europe and North America. The many pirated versions make sales figures difficult to establish, but it was probably the most popular book of its century. Napoleon claimed to have read it seven times. In the intervening years, this interest has persisted, and the book has inspired hundreds of imitations and sequels in every conceivable genre. Numerous editions are still in print in many languages, and in English-speaking lands the novel is regularly read on campuses in comparative literature and 'great book' courses. Literary critics, too, have maintained their interest, following on the lively debate that ensued upon the book's publication concerning its aesthetic and moral implications. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, critics increasingly explored its narrative strategies, its relation to various literary movements, its autobiographical elements, its depiction of an individual subjectivity, its social criticism, and its role in constructing a German national consciousness. Hundreds of subsequent critics have continued these discussions and added topics that reflect such developments as semiotics and gender studies. In fact, the history of 'Werther's' critical reception largely mirrors the history of literary criticism in the last 230 years. The present study traces this development, demonstrating how changing notions of both aesthetics and the role of literary criticism have influenced perceptions of this great work. Bruce Duncan is Professor of German Studies at Dartmouth College.

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