William Faulkner (1897-1962) has been credited with having the imagination to see, before other serious writers saw, the tremendous potential for drama, pathos, and sophisticated humor in the history and people of the South. In using this material and, in… Read More ›
Modernism comprised a broad series of movements in Europe and America that came to fruition roughly between 1910 and 1930. Its major exponents and practitioners included Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Luigi… Read More ›
American Literature 84 Lectures on American Literature by Dr. Arnold Weinstein, the Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor at Brown University. These lectures are from The Great Courses Explain the roles of self-reliance and the “self-made man” in the evolution of American… Read More ›
One way to understand the modern novel is to show its development in the work of writers such as Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and William Faulkner. This list is by no means exclusive, but… Read More ›
Woody Allen is one of the most prolific artists of the twentieth century. He is a highly praised director and scriptwriter, a successful actor, a dedicated clarinettist, an appreciated playwright, and an awarded short fiction writer. His entire work testifies… Read More ›
When William Faulkner (1897-1962) accepted the Nobel Prize in December, 1950, he made a speech that has become a justly famous statement of his perception of the modern world and of his particular place in it. In the address, Faulkner speaks… Read More ›
Just as fiction in general has opened up to a diverse ethnic spectrum of writers, so too has short fiction, and Louise Erdrich’s (born Karen Louise Erdrich, June 7, 1954) stories stand as excellent examples of contemporary Native American literature…. Read More ›
The gothic novel is a living tradition, a form that enjoys great popular appeal while provoking harsh critical judgments. It began with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765), then traveled through Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin,… Read More ›
James Thurber (December 8, 1894 – November 2, 1961) is best known as the author of humorous sketches, stories, and reminiscences dealing with urban bourgeois American life. To discuss Thurber as an artist in the short-story form is difficult, however,… Read More ›
Parody, satire, and verbal wit characterize S. J. Perelman’s (February 1, 1904 – October 17, 1979) works. Most of them are very short and tend to begin as conversational essays that develop into narrative or mock dramatic episodes and sometimes… 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 ›
Modernism, which emerged out of an “immense panorama of futility and anarchy“, rightly represented in Klee’s painting, The Angel of History, found its radical expression in literature through the techniques of impressionism and subjectivity as exemplified in the stream-of-consciousness method… Read More ›
Literature is forever transforming. A new literary age is new precisely because its important writers do things differently from their predecessors. Thus, it could be said that almost all significant literature is in some sense innovative or experimental at its… Read More ›
Many of Robert Penn Warren’s (April 24, 1905 – September 15, 1989) stories feature an adult protagonist’s introspective, guilty recollections of imperishable childhood events, of things done or left undone or simply witnessed with childish innocence. Blackberry Winter “Blackberry Winter”… Read More ›
Hermann Broch must surely be counted among such other major German novelists of the twentieth century as Franz Kafka, Mann, Robert Musil, Heinrich Böll, and Günter Grass, alongside such other creative artists as Wassily Kandinsky, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Gustav… Read More ›
Cynthia Ozick’s (born April 17, 1928) thesis for her master’s degree was titled “Parable in the Later Novels of Henry James,” an exercise that she later thought of as a first step in an act of devotion that resulted in… Read More ›
Kindly scroll down for more audio lectures on a variety of topics The History of World Literature Stories-and-Storytellers The-Epic-of-Gilgamesh The-Hebrew-Bible Homer’s-Iliad Homer’s-Odyssey Chinese-Classical-Literature Greek-Tragedy. Virgil’s-Aeneid Bhagavad-Gita The-New-Testament Beowulf Indian-Stories T’ang-Poetry Early-Japanese-Poetry. The-Tale-of-Genji Inferno-from-Dante’s-Divine-Comedy Chaucer’s-The-Canterbury-Tales 1001-Nights Wu-Ch’eng-en’s-Monkey The-Heptameron Shakespeare Cervantes’s-Don-Quixote Molière’s-Plays… Read More ›
Iconoclastic and irreverent, the postmodern novel is by definition a radical experiment that emerges when a writer feels the customary tropes of fiction have been exhausted. For the postmodernist, the well-worn genre of the novel is insufficient and no longer… Read More ›
The most obvious testimony to Shirley Ann Grau’s (July 8, 1929 – August 3, 2020) success is the Pulitzer Prize for fiction that she received in 1965 for The Keepers of the House. Significantly enough, the same novel appeared in condensed… Read More ›
From the ancient belief in humors to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ psychoanalytic and pharmacological methodologies, diverse theories about the mind have affected the literary production of novelists. Categorization according to these theories is difficult, because authors tend to mix… Read More ›
