Short Stories

Contains concise synopses of the plot, characters and themes along with a brief author biography, a discussion of the story's cultural and historical significance and excerpted criticism.

Contains concise synopses of the plot, characters, style and themes along with a brief author biography, a discussion of the story's historical significance and excerpted criticism.

While fashions of the rich and famous have been lessly chronicled, little attention has been paid to the meaning of clothes for everyone else. Yet between 1890 and the outbreak of World War II, as ready-to-wear came into its own, the clothes of ordinary Americans claimed the nation's attention. Allied with civic virtue, fashion now played an increasingly important role in shaping the national character.

Contains concise synopses of the plots, characters and themes along with a brief author biography, a discussion of the story's cultural and historical significance and excerpted criticism.

The Introduction to Literary Context series provides introductory overviews of some of the world's best-known works of literature, including novels, short stories, novellas, and poems, placing them in historical, societal, scientific and religious context of their time to deepen understanding and encourage discussion.

Contains concise synopses of the story's plots, characters and themes along with a brief author biography, a discussion of the story's cultural and historical significance and excerpted criticism.

Conversations with Ursula K. Le Guin assembles interviews with the renowned science-fiction and fantasy author of The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, The Lathe of Heaven, and the Earthsea sequence of novels and stories. For nearly five decades, Le Guin (b. 1929) has enjoyed immense success--both critical and popular--in science fiction and fantasy. But she has also published well-received works in such genres as realistic fiction, poetry, children's literature, criticism, and translation. In the pieces collected here, Le Guin takes every interview not as an opportunity to recapitulate long-held views but as an occasion for in-depth intellectual discourse. In interviews spanning over twenty-five years of her literary career, including a previously unpublished piece conducted by the volume's editor, Le Guin talks about such diverse subjects as U.S. foreign policy, the history of architecture, the place of women and feminist consciousness in American literature, and the differences between science fiction and fantasy. Carl Freedman is professor of English at Louisiana State University and is the author of Critical Theory and Science Fiction; The Incomplete Projects: Marxism, Modernity, and the Politics of Culture; and George Orwell: A Study in Ideology and Literary Form.

Contains concise synopses of the plot, characters and themes along with a brief author biography, a discussion of the story's cultural and historical significance and excerpted criticism.

Author of Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and other vivid portrayals of black American experience, Morrison ponders the effect that living in a historically racialized society has had on American writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She argues that race has become a metaphor, a way of referring to forces, events, and forms of social decay, economic division, and human panic. Her compelling point is that the central characteristics of American literature--individualism, masculinity, the insistence upon innocence coupled to an obsession with figurations of death and hell--are responses to a dark and abiding Africanist presence. Through her investigation of black characters, narrative strategies, and idiom in the fiction of white American writers, Morrison provides a daring perspective that is sure to alter conventional notions about American literature. She considers Willa Cather and the impact of race on concept and plot; turns to Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville to examine the black force that figures so significantly in the literature of early America; and discusses the implications of the Africanist presence at the heart of Huckleberry Finn. A final chapter on Ernest Hemingway is a brilliant exposition of the racial subtext that glimmers beneath the surface plots of his fiction.

Contains concise synopses of the story's plots, characters and themes along with a brief author biography, a discussion of the story's cultural and historical significance and excerpted criticism.

Contains concise synopses of the plot, characters and themes along with a brief author biography, a discussion of the story's cultural and historical significance and excerpted criticism.

This volume presents information on 20 short stories. It contains concise synopses of the plots, characters and themes along with a brief author biography, a discussion of the story's cultural and historical significance and excerpted criticism.

Contains concise synopses of the story's plot, characters and themes; a brief author biography; a discussion of the story's cultural and historical significance; excerpted criticism; and more.

Contains concise synopses of the story's plot, characters and themes; a brief author biography; a discussion of the story's cultural and historical significance; excerpted criticism; and more.

Concise synopses of the plots, characters and themes along with a brief author biography, a discussion of the story's cultural and historical significance and excerpted criticism.

Contains concise synopses of the story's plots, characters and themes along with a brief author biography, a discussion of the story's cultural and historical significance and excerpted criticism.

This collection brings together a selection of recent representative critical essays on O'Brien from a variety of perspectives. After opening with several short introductory essays, the volume moves on to consider O'Brien's semi-autobiographical coverage of his experience in Vietnam and discusses O'Brien's most famous work, The Things They Carried, in addition to several of his other works.

Sherman Alexie is, by many accounts, the most widely read American Indian writer in the United States and likely in the world. A literary polymath, Alexie's nineteen published books span a variety of genres and include his most recent National Book Award-winning "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian." Now, for the first time, a volume of critical essays is devoted to Alexie's work both in print and on the big screen. Editors Jeff Berglund and Jan Roush have assembled twelve leading scholars of American Indian literature to provide new perspectives on a writer with his finger on the pulse of America. Interdisciplinary in their approach to Alexie's work, these essays cover the writer's entire career, and are insightful and accessible to scholars and lay readers alike. This volume is a worthy companion to the work of one of our nations's most recognized contemporary voices.

Noticed initially as a Native American author, Sherman Alexie has since achieved a reputation as a significant figure in the American literary landscape. The essays in this set discuss many different aspects of Alexie's works.

Easy-to-read discussions of themes, plots and characters -- Easy-to-understand critical essays chosen specifically for students -- Analysis of each work's construction and historical context

The Introduction to Literary Context series provides introductory overviews of some of the world's best-known works of literature, including novels, short stories, novellas, and poems, placing them in historical, societal, scientific and religious context of their time to deepen understanding and encourage discussion.

This book explores the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, including One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and "A very old man with enormous wings".

Contains concise synopses of the story's plots, characters and themes along with a brief author biography, a discussion of the story's cultural and historical significance and excerpted criticism.

"Chapter 5: The Short Stories" includes significant content devoted to "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings"

Contains concise synopses of the plot, characters and themes along with a brief author biography, a discussion of the story's cultural and historical significance and excerpted criticism.

In-depth look at historical, cultural and literary relevance of Postcolonialism as well as modern critical interpretation of characteristic styles and themes.

Offering an accessible guide for readers and critics alike, this book is the first publication devoted entirely to Danticat's unique and remarkable work. It is also distinctive in that it addresses all of her published writing up to The Dew Breaker (2004), including her writing for children, her travel writing, her short fiction, and her novels. The book contains an exclusive interview with Danticat, in which she discusses her recent memoir, Brother, I'm Dying (2007), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. It also includes an extensive bibliography. With contributions from Danticat's fellow creative writers from both the Caribbean and the United States as well as leading scholars of Caribbean literature, this collection of essays aims to enrich readers' understanding of the various geographical, literary, and cultural contexts of her work and to demonstrate how it both influences and is influenced by them.

The literature of Caribbean writers living in the United States embodies a duality, an awareness of multiple sites of identity as well as conflict of place and space. Easily grouped with African Americans, Caribbean peoples and other immigrants from the African Diaspora make up the quasi-political face of Black America. But as immigrants from a former colonized community, Caribbean writers carry with them a historical experience that differentiates them from African Americans - they stand on the border of two spaces. What impact does this duality have on Caribbean literature written by writers who have left the home space for American soil? As many writers have suggested, Caribbean writers are continuously looking back to home in an attempt to understand who they are and where they belong. This book postulates that it is through nostalgia, or an attempt to renegotiate the past, that the Caribbean writer attempts to reconcile his/her duality. Nostalgia can be directly linked to an understanding of, and by extension a critique of, American social and political practices as well as an appraisal of colonial influences in the Caribbean. Thus the discourse of Caribbean writers living in America operates on different levels: Although Caribbean migratory writers are continuously looking back to home , this nostalgia is tied to a reevaluation of American and island consciousness. The texts discussed in this work are, in effect, engaged in critical analysis; the texts perform criticism of the home country and that man's country - the United States.

Contains concise synopses of the plots, characters and themes along with a brief author biography, a discussion of the story's cultural and historical significance and excerpted criticism.

Contains concise synopses of the story's plots, characters and themes along with a brief author biography, a discussion of the story's cultural and historical significance and excerpted criticism.

Concise synopses of the plots, characters and themes along with a brief author biography, a discussion of the story's cultural and historical significance and excerpted criticism.

It contains concise synopses of the plots, characters and themes along with a brief author biography, a discussion of the story's cultural and historical significance and excerpted criticism.

In Wild Unrest, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz offers a vivid portrait of Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the 1880s, drawing new connections between the author's life and work and illuminating the predicament of women then and now. "The Yellow Wall-Paper" captured a woman's harrowing descent into madness and drew on the author's intimate knowledge of mental illness. Like the narrator of her story, Gilman was a victim of what was termed "neurasthenia" or "hysteria"--a "bad case of the nerves." She had faced depressive episodes since adolescence, and with the arrival of marriage and motherhood, they deepened. In 1887 she suffered a severe breakdown and sought the "rest cure" of famed neurologist S. Weir Mitchell. Her marriage was a troubled one, and in the years that followed she separated from and ultimately divorced her husband. It was at this point, however, that Gilman embarked on what would become an influential career as an author, lecturer, and advocate for women's rights. Horowitz draws on a treasure trove of primary sources to illuminate the making of "The Yellow Wall-Paper": Gilman's journals and letters, which closely track her daily life and the reading that most influenced her; the voluminous diaries of her husband, Walter Stetson, which contain verbatim transcriptions of conversations with and letters from Charlotte; and the published work of S. Weir Mitchell, whose rest cure dominated the treatment of female "hysteria" in late 19th century America. Horowitz argues that these sources ultimately reveal that Gilman's great story emerged more from emotions rooted in the confinement and tensions of her unhappy marriage than from distress following Mitchell's rest cure. Wild Unrest adds immeasurably to our understanding of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, uncovering both the literary and personal sources behind "The Yellow Wall-Paper."

Contains concise synopses of the plot, characters and themes along with a brief author biography, a discussion of the story's cultural and historical significance and excerpted criticism.

Contains concise synopses of the plots, characters and themes along with a brief author biography, a discussion of the story's cultural and historical significance and excerpted criticism.