Carson McCullers’s (February 19, 1917 – September 29, 1967) short stories (ruling out for the moment the novella The Ballad of the Sad Café, 1943, serial; 1951, book) often explore the intense emotional content of seemingly undramatic situations. Plot is… Read More ›
Carson McCullers’s (February 19, 1917 – September 29, 1967) fiction has a childlike directness, a disconcerting exposure of unconscious impulses in conjunction with realistic detail. She is like the candid child who announces that the emperor in his new clothes… Read More ›
With the increasing impact of the gay rights movement and acceptance of gays in mainstream society, gay studies and gay literature are emerging as respected fields. Defining gay literature is sometimes difficult, given the frequent vague and subtle references to… Read More ›
America became a subject for literature after the Revolutionary War, when writers began the exploration of themes and motifs distinctly American. Continuing the Puritan belief in America as the New Eden, writers stressed the millennial nature of settlement and progress…. Read More ›
Homosexuality, traditionally regarded as a disease or perversion by church, state, and society, was rigorously denounced and condemned by those same institutions. In the case of the arts and literature, works featuring homoeroticism or gays and lesbians as characters were… Read More ›
Though he is touted sometimes as the chief American practitioner of the absurd in drama, Edward Albee (March 12, 1928 – September 16, 2016) only rarely combines in a single work both the techniques and the philosophy associated with that… Read More ›
The pattern of Truman Capote’s 1(924 – 1984) career suggests a divided allegiance to two different, even opposing literary forms—objective realism and romance. Capote’s earliest fiction belongs primarily to the imagination of romance. It is intense, wondrously evocative, subjective; in place… Read More ›
In The Writer on Her Work, Anne Tyler (born October 25, 1941) discusses the importance of her having lived as a child in “an experimental Quaker community in the wilderness.” For her, this early experience of isolation and her later… Read More ›
You must be logged in to post a comment.