By the end of the nineteenth century, writers interested in exploring supernatural themes had abandoned the mode of gothic fiction pioneered by eighteenth century English novelist Horace Walpole. Walpole and his imitators had exploited such props as medieval ruins and… Read More ›
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s reading in American colonial history confirmed his basically ambivalent attitude toward the American past, particularly the form that Puritanism took in the New England colonies. Especially interested in the intensity of the Puritan-Cavalier rivalry, the Puritan inclination to… Read More ›
A distinctive literature about childhood has existed since the Victorian era, but not so about adolescence as a stage of life with its own integrity, concerns, and distinct problems. Teachers, librarians, and parents argue that the classics of world literature… Read More ›
The term “fantasy” refers to all works of fiction that attempt neither the realism of the realistic novel nor the “conditional realism” of science fiction. Among modern critics, the primacy of the realistic novel is taken for granted. Realistic novels… Read More ›
Agatha Christie’s (15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976) trademarks in detective fiction brought to maturity the classical tradition of the genre, which was in its adolescence when she began to write. The tradition had some stable characteristics, but she… 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 ›
Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948) Eliot himself gives an uncustomarily detailed account of the publication of Notes towards the Definition of Culture in his brief preface to the booklength edition first published in November 1948. Four years earlier,… Read More ›
The detective story is a special branch of crime fiction that focuses attention on the examination of evidence that will lead to the solution of the mystery. The Oxford English Dictionary records the first printed use of the noun “detective”… Read More ›
Giovanni Papini (1881-1956) argued that Italians are less suited temperamentally to writing novels than to writing poetry, essays, and biographies. Certainly, the art of storytelling has long been esteemed in Italy; Baldassare Castiglione, in Il cortegiano (1528; The Book of… 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 ›
Known as the founder of French symbolism (though not himself part of the movement), and often associated with the artistic decadence and aestheticism of the later nineteenth century, Baudelaire was born in Paris where he lived a bohemian life, adopting… Read More ›
In 1937, Vladeslav Khodasevich, an émigré poet and champion of “V. Sirin’s” work, wrote, “Sirin [Nabokov] proves for the most part to be an artist of form, of the writer’s device, and not only in that . . . sense… Read More ›
If the weight of critical opinion places Tennessee Williams (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983), below Eugene O’Neill as America’s premiere dramatist, there should be no question that the former playwright is without peer in either the diversity of… Read More ›
Stephen King (born. September 21, 1947) may be known as a horror writer, but he calls himself a “brand name,” describing his style as “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonald’s.” His fast-food version… Read More ›
Bowles holds a unique place in American literature. As an exile, he shared with 1920’s expatriate novelist Gertrude Stein, among others, a distanced perspective on his native culture. Through his translations, he earned an international reputation as an author with… 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 ›
The German literary theorist Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was associated with what is known as the Frankfurt School of German critical theory (although he was never a member of its institutional body, the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research). His work is… Read More ›
Whiteness studies investigates the parameters of white racial identity, locating its scope and function in systems of representation. This field of study takes as its founding premise the constructed nature of identity, a poststructuralist concept heralded by race theorists who… Read More ›
E. L. Doctorow’s (January 6, 1931 – July 21, 2015) work is concerned with those stories, myths, public figures, and literary and historical forms that have shaped public and political consciousness. Even when his subject is not overtly political—as in… Read More ›
In a literary period that witnessed the exhaustion of literature, wholesale formal experimentation, a general distrust of language, the death of the novel, and the blurring of the lines separating fiction and play, mainstream art and the avantgarde, John Cheever… Read More ›
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