DURHAM UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF
ENGLISH STUDIES
AMERICAN FICTION
READING LIST
BOOKLET
2014/2015
AMERICAN FICTION
General information
Module convenors: Dr Daniel Grausam (email:daniel.grausam@durham.ac.uk, 48
Old Elvet. Rm. 202) and Dr Sam Thomas (email:
samuel.thomas@durham.ac.uk, 48 Old Elvet, Rm. 205).
On-line support: over the summer you will gain access to the module resources on
duo (a key port of call for information and any relevant notices and
announcements). For each topic you will normally look to duo for back-up
materials, book lists and suggestions for independent study outside
tutorials. You will also find direct links to some full-text online articles;
links to useful American Literature web-sites; Frequently Asked Questions;
assessment advice; easy email facilities for contacting the rest of your
tutorial group; and more.
What to expect on the module
Novels and short stories have been flourishing in the United States for over two
hundred years, and the field of ‘American Literature’ is ever expanding. The
concepts underpinning the idea of a national literature are themselves now
under challenge, and the module will introduce some of these current
debates as we survey the richness and variety of American fiction. In some
lectures we will move rapidly through a number of texts and contexts,
whilst others will offer a more sustained exploration of a specific writer or
theme. Throughout the module we’ll be suggesting possible starting-points
for your own further reading and research.
The module is designed to:



introduce a range of texts (both canonical and less mainstream) from the late
eighteenth century to the present day;
(in overview lectures, especially) give you a picture of once-popular books
which have lost their readership over time (e.g. Riders of the Purple Sage), but
which have also created powerful cultural stereotypes challenged by other
writers (e.g. Annie Proulx);
set the fiction within various cultural, historical and theoretical frameworks;
 bring into view a range of genres, literary modes and
forms;
 raise questions about the connections between literary
texts and ideas of personal and national identities;
 suggest a variety of approaches to the selected texts,
both in terms of their own culture and period, and from
the perspective of the twenty-first century;
 encourage you to bring texts together in ways that you
find most rewarding and interesting.
If you are entering the second year, this lecture list might
come as a bit of a shock. The idea isn’t that you read
everything on it, for every lecture, but that lectures will
help you to choose your own route through the module. You’ll be able to
concentrate on particular aspects of the module in tutorials and assessment.
If you are writing a dissertation on American Fiction, or you are taking a
Special Topic which features American texts, you will find that you still have
plenty of options and can easily avoid overlap.
Structure
Works grouped together in a unit are linked by recurring concepts and themes, and
sometimes by a historical or geographical framework. These units are not
intended to be rigid. You will, however, get more out of the module if you
attend all the lectures within each unit, even if you have already decided on
the specific texts you’ll be focusing on.
Examination
Summative assessment of the module will consist of:
(1) One assessed essay (2,000 words) due at the start of the Easter term
(30%);
(2) An unseen 2½ hour exam (70%). (Two essays.)
American Fiction includes a coursework element. The
assessed essay takes the form of a passage-based
assignment and allows for individual interests and
choice. Full details of this, and the rubric of the twoessay exam at each level, will be issued shortly after
the start of the academic year. If you find yourself
worried, or if you need further clarification, please
contact us or your tutor well in advance of the essay
deadline and/or examinations.
Editions and critical reading
We suggest some particular texts below. Unless
otherwise indicated, you may find Oxford World’s
Classics or Penguin editions convenient and reliable for many works.
Wordsworth and Dover also offer you the basic text and the newer
Wordsworth editions now have full introductions and scholarly notes (and
still cost only £1-£2). The university library holds Norton anthologies
containing many full texts. Many of the primary texts are now online, often
in facsimile first editions; not ideal for longer reads, but great for
searchable texts or quick reference; you will find links to many of these on
duo. The library is very well stocked in criticism for American Literature,
and you will find additional resources if you are prepared to explore other
subject shelves – e.g. for history, sociology, art, or anthropology. You will
also be able to take advantage of the library’s subscriptions to online
journals. The library has DVDs of screen adaptations, and we are building up
our collection in the department office.
Recommended preliminary reading:
 Over the summer vacation, you should sample a range of American fiction.
See lecture list below. Whatever you read (and whatever preconceptions
you might have), making a start over the summer will help to enlarge your
sense of the literature of the US.
 You should also try to look at an outline of American history. The onevolume History of the United States of America by Hugh Brogan, is both
readable and informative [the 2001 edition is the most up to date and is
much stronger on some aspects of American history than earlier editions].
More expensive, but possibly available in your local library, is George Brown
Tindall and David E. Shi, America: A Narrative History (5th ed. 1999).
Enjoy your summer reading!
Dr Daniel Grausam and Dr Sam Thomas, Module
Convenors
MICHAELMAS TERM 2014
Introduction
‘In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?’
Sydney Smith, Edinburgh Review, January, 1820.
The first lecture introduces some of the questions which will concern us
throughout the module: e.g. problems about the term ‘American
Literature’; the continual reinvention of US identity in art; anxieties about
relations to Europe and the colonial past; ‘Americanisation’ v. the multiple
and diverse voices of the United States; creating a ‘useable past’; the quest
for the American epic; the emergence of the dominant white voice; fiction
as a challenge to official narratives of historical progress and ownership.
(1) The American ‘Multiverse’: Approaching US Fiction
Dr Thomas
I: Searching for the USA: Visions / Voices / Identities
The fictions we explore in this unit seek to give voice to a variety of US identities,
writing in dialogue and in contest with certain received truths. We explore a
number of texts that depict journeys across time, space, cultures, and
conflicts (Brockden Brown’s account of the anxieties of the new republic,
Twain’s vernacular tale of life on the Mississippi).The overview lectures
explore how two of the most prominent figures in the US imagination – the
Cowboy and the Native American – have been constructed and reconfigured
across literary history.
(2) Making an American Book: Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland (1798) and
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Dr
Grausam
(3) Overview lecture: Cowboy Fiction, Gender and the Vanishing Frontier: Zane
Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) and Annie Proulx, Close Range:
Wyoming Stories, Vol. 1 (1999)
Dr Thomas
(4) Overview lecture: ‘Out of the Silence’: Native American Literary Identities:
James Fenimore Cooper, Last of the Mohicans (1826) and Louise Erdrich,
Love Medicine (1993)
Dr
Thomas
II: American Renaissance / American Rebels
Originally coined by the critic F. O. Matthiessen, the term ‘American Renaissance’
describes a moment of extraordinary creativity during the mid-nineteenth
century, in which a series of ‘masterpieces’ were forged in a five year
period. Whilst this framework has been vigorously challenged by later
scholars, there is no doubt that the years 1850-1855 produced some truly
remarkable fiction – all the more remarkable given the fact that these works
offer such powerful critiques of US narratives of progress, optimism and
enterprise. We begin with Hawthorne’s tormented vision of Puritan history
and buried sin before turning to the book against which all claims about the
‘Great American Novel’ are measured: Herman Melville’s epic of whaling,
metaphysics and monomania. The unit concludes with Thoreau’s hugely
influential writings on ecology and political resistance, tracing the ways in
which his legacies (both conservative and radical) continue to be felt.
(5) Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter (1850)
Dr Wootton
(6) In the Name of the Devil: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851) Dr Thomas
(7) The Nature of Resistance: Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854) and ‘Civil
Disobedience’ (1849)
Dr
Thomas
III: Style, Self and Society
These lectures look at three of the great ‘stylists’ in the
American canon (James, Wharton, Fitzgerald), and the unit
explores their fictions with a special emphasis on selfhood and
society. Moving from the ‘Gilded Age’ to the ‘Jazz Age’, these
literary responses to the expanding American economy open
up concerns about form and genre (‘Realism’, ‘Naturalism’,
‘Modernism’ and so on), as well as asking searching questions
about ‘values’ (economic, aesthetic and moral); about
gender, desire, display and performance; about the role of
the leisure-classes and fashion; about marginalisation,
entrapment, and poverty.
(8) Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
James
Professor
(9) Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905) and Ethan Frome (1911)
Dr Wootton
(10) F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925) [with references to Tender is the
Night (1934)]
Dr Sandy
Epiphany Term 2015
IV: Telling 'The South’ – Reading through Race and Region
These lectures approach fiction through region, specifically the South. We look at
literary representations of the devastations of slavery, at the rising polemic
which climaxed in the Civil War (the ‘War Between the States’, 1861-65),
and at the reverberations of these racial and socio-political divisions in
some later fictions. We look at testimonies from African American
autobiographies and survey some of the rhetorical clichés of ‘the plantation’
(e.g. in the cinematic block-buster, Gone With the Wind, 1939). The
writings of two Nobel Prize winners mirror these in nightmarish form, with
the contradictory and driven narratives of William Faulkner’s Absalom,
Absalom!, 1936, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, 1987, a late twentiethcentury memorial to the ‘Sixty Million and more’. Puncturing the mythmaking and sentimental gentility of the literature of the dominant white
masters, these novels revisit Southern culture in order to face the South’s
haunted past.
(11) Narratives of Slavery: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, An American Slave (1845), and Harriet Jacobs [Linda Brent],
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
Dr Terry
(12) Overview lecture: Southern Myths and Fictions: Kate Chopin, ‘Désirée’s Baby’
(1893), and Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (1936); film (1939)
Dr Terry
(13) Tales from the Dark House: William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
Dr Grausam
(14) 'Not a story to pass on': Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987) Dr Terry
Reading Week
V: Post-war Promise / Post-war Paranoia
This final unit concentrates on the hopes and fears
which have come to define the American experience
after 1945. Reflecting both the vibrant,
transformative promise of post-war society and the
paranoiac suspicion that shadowy forces are
controlling the direction of American life, these
lectures explore a series of oblique and troubled
works that have now become cult fictions. In various
ways, these texts dramatise unsettling and sometimes revelatory transitions
- from insider to outsider, certainty to doubt, familiarity to estrangement.
Beginning with Kerouac’s definitive ‘Beat’ fiction, the unit then swerves off
the highway to explore some of America’s weird back roads: Plath’s
meditation on psychotherapy and mental illness; Bellow’s accounts of the
energies and anxieties unleashed by the 1960s; Pynchon’s unclassifiable tale
of conspiracy, questing and secret communities; DeLillo’s postmodern
examination of technology, pharmaceuticals and toxic threat. Our final
lectures explore life beyond the novel, by turning to contemporary short
stories and serial television.
(15) Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)
Professor Regan
(16) The Cold War: Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)
Dr Grausam
(17) Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964) and Mr Sammler’s Planet (1970) Dr Grausam
(18) Postal Politics: Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) [with some brief
references to Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)]
Dr Thomas
EASTER TERM 2015
(19) Postmodern America: Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985) Dr Grausam
(20) Overview lecture: Youth and Age: Contemporary American Women’s Short
Stories (Lorrie Moore, Grace Paley and Sandra Cisneros)
Dr Terry
(21) Overview lecture: TV Nation: Reflecting on American Storytelling [will refer to
TV shows such as The Wire, Breaking Bad and Justified)
Dr
Thomas
Critical Reading: Selective Book-Lists
N.B. We do not expect you to read everything on these lists! Neither do we expect
you to confine yourself to the works suggested here. Use them as a guide to
selecting critical and contextual reading when you want some basic
information or plan to follow up a topic in more detail.
When it comes to journals, you can do global searches for a topic, text or author
using programmes such as JSTOR, Project Muse or Literature Online. We
recommend publications such as: Journal of American Studies, American
Literature, American Literary Realism, Southern Quarterly, African
American Review, American Literary History, Studies in American Indian
Literatures, Arizona Quarterly, Studies in American Fiction, American
Literary Scholarship [this is an annual review of mainstream authors and
topics, summarising criticism which has appeared during the year]. For
historical interest, try The Making of America (Google this), for searchable
reproductions of many famous 19th-century journals.
General contexts and issues
Crane, Greg. The Cambridge Introduction to the Nineteenth-Century American
Novel
(2007).
Gidley, Mick, ed. Modern American Culture: An Introduction (1993).
Gidley, Mick and Robert Lawson-Peebles, eds. Modern American Landscapes
(1995).
Klarer, Mario. A Short Literary History of the United States (2014).
Lamb, Robert Paul and G. R. Thompson, eds. A Companion to American Fiction
18651914 (2009).
Messent, Peter. New Readings in the American Novel: Narrative Theory and its
Application
(1998).
Mitchell, Jeremy and Richard Maidment, eds. Open University: The United States
in the
Twentieth Century: Culture (1994), esp. chapters 1 and 10: Kenneth Thompson,
‘Identity
and Belief’ and Allan Lloyd-Smith, ‘Is There an American Culture?’
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
(1992).
Reynolds, Guy. Twentieth-Century American Women’s Fiction: A Critical
Introduction
(1999).
Robinson, Lillian S. ‘Treason our Text: Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon,’
in The
New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter (1986).
Rowe, John Carlos, ed.. Post-Nationalist American Studies (1998).
Ruland, Richard and Malcolm Bradbury. From Puritanism to Postmodernism. A
History of
American Literature (1991).
Scofield, Martin. The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story (2006).
Seed, David. A Companion to Twentieth-Century United States Fiction (2010).
Showalter, Elaine. Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s
Writing(1991). [esp. Ch.1 ‘American Questions’]
Stonely, Peter and Cindy Weinstein, eds. A Concise Companion to American Fiction
19001950 (2007).
Tanner, Tony. City of Words: American Fiction: 1950-1970 (1971).
---. Scenes of Nature, Signs of Men (1987).
Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present (revised
edition,
2005).
I: Searching for the USA: Visions/Voices/Identities
Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland
Text: Any available edition.
Barnard, Philip, Mark L. Kamrath, and Stephen Shapiro, eds. Revising Charles
Brockden Brown: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality in the Early Republic.
(2004).
Crain, Caleb. American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New
Nation. (2001) (chapter 3 is on Brown’s fiction)
Koenigs, Thomas. “‘Whatever May Be the Merit of My Book as a Fiction’: Wieland’s
Instructional Fictionality.” English Literary History 79.3 (Fall 2012): 715–
745.
Korobkin, Laura H. “Murder by Madman: Criminal Responsibility, Law, and
Judgment in Wieland.” American Literature 72 (2000): 721-750
Ruttenberg, Nancy. Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of
American Authorship. (1998). (Chapter 4 discusses Wieland)
Shapiro, Stephen. The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel:
Reading the Atlantic World-System. (2008) (chapter 5 is on Wieland)
Wolfe, Eric A. “Ventriloquizing Nation: Voice, Identity, and Radical Democracy in
Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland.” American Literature 78.3 (2006): 431457
Mark Twain [Samuel Clemens], Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Text: Oxford World’s Classics (introduction by Emory Elliott), or other unabridged.
The Wordsworth Classics edition, with introduction and notes by Stuart
Hutchinson, also includes The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The Virginia ‘Mark
Twain in His Times’ site, will give you details of textual controversies and
online resources.
Messent, Peter. The Cambridge Introduction to Mark Twain (2007).
Railton, Stephen. Mark Twain: A Short Introduction (2003).
Abernathy, Jeff. To Hell and Back: Race and Betrayal in the Southern Novel
(2003).
Bush, Harold K. Mark Twain and the spiritual crisis of his age (2007).
Chadwick-Joshua, Jocelyn, The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn
(1998)
Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. Lighting out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain
and
American Culture (1997)
--- ed. A Historical Guide to Mark Twain (2002).
Graff, Gerald and James Phelan. ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’: A Case
Study in
Critical Controversy (1995).
Gray, Richard, and Owen Robinson, eds. A Companion to the Literature and
Culture of the
American South (2004) [Chapter on Twain, within good intro. to southern literary
contexts]. [Online. Library e-resources]
Kaplan, Fred. The Singular Mark Twain: A Biography (2003).
Lamb, Robert Paul. ‘America Can Break Your Heart: On the Significance of Mark
Twain’ in A Companion to American Fiction 1865-1914, ed. Robert Paul
Lamb and G. R. Thompson (2009). [Online. Library e-resources]
Lindberg, Gary. The Confidence Man in American Fiction (1982)
Mensh, Elaine and Mensh, Harry. Black, White and ‘Huckleberry Finn: Re-imagining
the
American Dream (2000).
Messent, Peter and Louis J. Budd, eds. A Companion to Mark Twain (2005).
[Online.
Library e-resources]
Quirk, Tom. Coming to Grips with ‘Huckleberry Finn’: Essays on a Book, a Boy and
a Man
(1993).
---. ‘The Realism of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ in The Cambridge Companion
to
Realism and Naturalism, ed. Donald Pizer (1995).
Robinson, Forrest G, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain (1995).
Stoneley, Peter. Mark Twain and the Feminine Aesthetic (1992).
Skandera Trombley, Laura E. and Michael J. Kiskis, eds. Constructing Mark
Twain: New
Directions in Scholarship (2001).
Cowboy Fiction, Gender and the Vanishing Frontier
Aquila, Richard. Wanted Dead or Alive: The American West in Popular Culture
(1996).
Etulain, Richard. Re-imagining the Modern American West: A Century of Fiction,
History, and Art (1996).
.-- Telling Western Stories: from Buffalo Bill to Larry McMurtry (1999).
Packard, Chris. Queer Cowboys: And Other Erotic Male Friendships in NineteenthCentury American Literature (2007).
Mitchell, Lee Clark. Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (1998).
Mort, John. Read the High Country: A Guide to Western Books and Films (2006).
Pilkington, William T. Critical Essays on the Western American Novel (1980).
Rosowski. Susan J. Birthing a Nation: Gender, Creativity, and the West in
American Literature (2000).
Savage, William W. The Cowboy Hero: His Image in American History & Culture
(1979).
Slatta, Richard. The Cowboy Encyclopedia (1994).
--. The Mythical West: An Encyclopedia of Legend, Lore and Popular Culture
(2001).
Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in TwentiethCentury America (1998).
Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (2nd
edition, 2007).
Taylor, Lonn and Ingrid Maar. The American Cowboy (1983).
Westbrook, Max, ed. A Literary History of the American West (1987).
--. Updating the Literary West (1997).
Whale, Alf H. The Cowboy Hero and Its Audience: Popular Culture As Market
Derived Art (2000).
Witschi, Nicholas S., ed. A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the
American West (2011).
Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage.
Text: Oxford World’s Classics (excellent introduction by Lee Clark Mitchell). This
text follows the first edition published by Harper Brothers in 1912.
Blake, Kevin S. ‘Zane Grey and Images of the American West’, Geographical
Review, 85.2 (1995). [via JSTOR]
Bourassa, Alan. ‘Riders of the Virtual Sage: Zane Grey, Cormac McCarthy, and the
Transformation of the Popular Western’, Criticism, 48.4 (2006). [via Project
Muse]
Gruber, Frank. Zane Grey: A Biography (1970).
Jackson, Carlton. Zane Grey (1989).
Kant, Candace C. Zane Grey’s Arizona (1984).
Kimball, Arthur G. Ace of Hearts: The Westerns of Zane Grey (1993).
May, Stephen J. Zane Grey: Romancing the West (1997).
Mitchell, Lee Clark. ‘White Slaves and Purple Sage: Plotting Sex in Zane Grey’s
West American Literary History, 6.2 (1994). [via JSTOR]
Pauly, Thomas H. Zane Grey: His Life, His Adventures, His Women (2007).
Annie Proulx, Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Vol. 1
Text: Any version but do make sure you get the right volume! The collection is also
available as Close Range: Brokeback Mountain and Other Stories (film
tie-in edition, Harper, 2005).
Arosteguy, Katie O. ‘“It was all a hard, fast ride that ended in the mud”:
Deconstructing
the Myth of the Cowboy in Annie Proulx’s Close Range:
Wyoming Stories’, Western American Literature, 45.2 (2010). [via Project
Muse]
Asquith, Mark. Annie Proulx's ‘Brokeback Mountain’ and ‘Postcards’ (2009).
Block Richard. ‘“I’m nothin. I’m nowhere”: Echoes of Queer Messianism in
Brokeback Mountain’, CR: The New Centennial Review, 9.1 (2009). [via
Project Muse]
Brower, Sue. ‘“They'd Kill Us if They Knew”: Transgression and the Western’,
Journal of Film and Video, 62.4 (2010). [via Project Muse]
Dolezal, Joshua A. ‘Literary Activism, Social Justice, and the Future of
Bioregionalism’,
Ethics & the Environment, 13.1 (2008). [via Project Muse]
Howard, John. ‘Of Closets and Other Rural Voids’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and
Gay Studies, 13.1 (2007).
Hunt, Alex, ed. The Geographical Imagination of Annie Proulx: Rethinking
Regionalism (2009).
Proulx, Annie, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. Brokeback Mountain: Story to
Screenplay (2005).
Proulx, Annie (ed). Red Desert: History of a Place (2008). [ecological project]
Rood, Karen Lane. Understanding Annie Proulx (2001).
Scanlon, Julie. ‘Why Do We Still Want To Believe?: The Case of Annie Proulx’,
Journal of Narrative Theory, 38.1 (2008). [via Project Muse]
Stacy, James. Reading Brokeback Mountain: Essays on the Story and the Film
(2007).
Film: Brokeback Mountain. Dir. Ang Lee (2005). Starring Heath Ledger and Jake
Gyllenhaal.
Native American Literary Identities
Interesting selections of hard-to-find texts by Native American story-tellers and
writers are included in the Norton and Heath anthologies of American
literature. You might browse these anthologies for C19th voices (e.g.
William Apess, ‘An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man’ 1833, in Heath
Vol. I; or Chippewa legends, same volume); or look in the later volumes of
these anthologies, for extracts from such contemporary writers as Leslie
Marmon Silko (e.g Ceremony, 1977, Storyteller, 1981); N. Scott Momaday
(e.g House Made of Dawn, 1968, The Way to Rainy Mountain, 1969),
Sherman Alexie (e.g. The Lone-Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, 1997).
The lecture will attempt to contextualise such voices against white literary
mythologies of ‘the Indian’ in such texts as James Fenimore Cooper’s The
Last of the Mohicans (1826).
Native American literature – general criticism
Deloria, Philip Joseph. Playing Indian (1998).
Dennis, Helen Mary. Native American Literature: Toward a Spatialized Reading
(2007).
Grice, Helena et al. Beginning Ethnic American Literatures (2001). [Ch. 2 provides
a useful introduction]
Krupat, Arnold. The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the
Canon (1989).
Honour, Hugh. The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the
Discoveries to the Present Time (1976). [Painting, sculpture, writing]
Lundquist, Suzanne Evertsen. Native American Literatures: An Introduction (2004).
Porter, Joyce and Kenneth M. Roemer. The Cambridge Companion to Native
American Literature (2005).
James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans
Text: The Last of the Mohicans ed. John McWilliams, Oxford World’s Classics.
Excellent introduction, full bibliography, contextual sections and notes. Or
other available, but watch out for abridged versions.
Clark, Robert. History, Ideology & Myth in American Fiction, 1823-52 (1984).
Howard, David. ‘James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales’, in Tradition and
Tolerance in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1966), ed. David Howard, John
Lucas, John Goode.
McWilliams, John. ‘Red Satan: Cooper and the American Indian Epic’ in James
Fenimore Cooper: New Critical Essays, ed. Robert Clark (1985).
Tawil, Ezra J. The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the
Frontier Romance (2006).
Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs (1985), ch. 4. ‘No Apologies for the Iroquois:
A New Way to Read the Leatherstocking Novels’.
Film: The Last of the Mohicans. Dir. Michael Mann (1992). Starring Daniel DayLewis, Russell Means and Eric Schweig.
Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine
Text: Love Medicine: New and Expanded Version, New York: Holt, 1993 or other
editions but make sure that you read the revised version as this has extra
stories.
Chavkin, Allan, ed. The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich (1999).
--- and Nancy Feyl Chavkin, eds. Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael
Dorris (1994).
Jacobs, Connie A. The Novels of Louise Erdrich: Stories of her People (2001).
Nagel, James. ‘The Ethnic Resonance of Genre: Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine,’
The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre
(2001).
Stookey, Lorena L. Louise Erdrich: A Critical Companion (1999).
Wong, Hertha D. Sweet, ed. Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: A Casebook (2000).
II. American Renaissance / American Rebels
General
Brodhead, Richard. Hawthorne, Melville and the Novel (1976).
Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957).
Lewis, W. R. B. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the
Nineteenth Century (1955).
Matthiessen, Francis Otto. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of
Emerson and Whitman (1968).
Pease, Donald. Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural
Context (1987).
Thomas, Brook. Cross-Examinations of Law and Literature: Cooper, Hawthorne,
Stowe and Melville (1991).
Tanner, Tony. The Reign of Wonder (1965). [Interesting early perspective]
Tallack, Douglas. ‘Transcendentalism and Pragmatism’ in Gidley, Modern American
Culture (1993). [Good bibliography]
Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination
in the Age of Emerson and Melville (1988).
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
Text: any unabridged. (Check that it begins with ‘The Custom House’)
Murfin, Ross C., ed. The Scarlet Letter: Nathaniel Hawthorne (1992). (Case Studies
in Contemporary Criticism) [Text + essays to represent some different
theoretical approaches]
Arac, Jonathan.‘Reading the Letter’, Diacritics 9 (1979).
Baym, Nina. The Shape of Hawthorne’s Career (1976).
Bosco, Ronald A. and Jillmarie Murphy, Hawthorne in his own time: A biographical
chronicle of his life, drawn from recollections, interviews, and memoirs by
family, friends, and associates (2007).
Brodhead, Richard. ‘Hawthorne, Melville and the Fiction of Prophecy’, in Nathaniel
Hawthorne: New Critical Essays, ed. A. Robert Lee (1982).
McCall, Dan. Citizens of Somewhere Else: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James
(1999).
Miller, Edwin Haviland. Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne
(1991).
Millington, Richard. Practicing Romance: Narrative Form and Cultural Engagement
in Hawthorne’s Fiction (1992).
--. ed. The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne (2004).
Leland S. Person. The Cambridge Introduction to Nathaniel Hawthorne (2007).
Pfister, Joel. The Production of Personal Life: Class, Gender, and the
Psychological in Hawthorne’s Fiction (1991).
Reynolds, Larry J., ed. A Historical Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne (2001).
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Text: Moby-Dick: The Penguin Edition (1992), introduced by Andrew Delbanco,
offers the text currently seen as definitive.
Annesley, James. ‘Melville’s No Logo: Moby Dick and the Globalization Debate’,
Third Text, 18:1 (2004). [online. Alternatively, see the relevant section of
Annesely’s Fictions of Globalization (2006)]
Bellis, Peter J. No Mysteries Out of Ourselves: Identity and Textual Form in the
Novels of Herman Melville (1990).
Bloom, Harold, ed. Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’ (2009).
Brodtkorb, Paul. Ishmael’s White World: A Phenomenological Reading of ‘Moby
Dick’ (1965).
Bryant, John. ‘Moby Dick as Revolution,’ in R. S. Levine, ed. The Cambridge
Companion to Herman Melville (1998).
Cesarino, Cesare. Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, and Conrad in Crisis (2000).
Guetti, James. The Limits of Metaphor: Melville, Conrad and Faulkner (1967).
Hayes, Kevin J. The Cambridge Introduction to Herman Melville (2007).
James, C. L. R. Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1985).
Jehlen, Myra. American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation and the Continent
(1986).
Kelley, Wyn. Melville’s City: Literary and Urban Form in the Nineteenth Century
(1991).
Karcher, Carolyn L. Shadow Over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race and Violence in
Melville’s America (1980).
Leavis, Charles R. A Coincidence of Wants: The Novel and Neoclassical Economics
(2000).
MacKenthun, Gesa. ‘Postcolonial Masquerade: Antebellum Fiction and the
Transatlantic Slave Trade,’ in Klaus Schmidt, ed. Early America Re-explored
(2000).
Olsen, Charles. Call Me Ishmael (1947).
Peretz, Eyal. Literature, Disaster, and the Enigma of Power: A Reading of ‘MobyDick’(2003).
Post-Lauria, Sheila. Corresponding Colorings: Melville in the Market Place (1996).
Rogin, Michael Paul. Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman
Melville (1983).
Sanborn, Geoffrey. The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a
Postcolonial Reader (1998).
Thoreau: Walden and ‘Civil Disobedience’
Texts: Any unabridged version of Walden will be fine but the World’s Classics
edition is preferable. ‘Civil Disobedience’ can be found in the Norton
Anthology and online via Project Gutenberg.
Bennett, Jane. Thoreau’s Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild (1994).
--. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2000). [theoretical work which
includes various further reflections on Thoreau]
Bloom, Harold, ed. Henry David Thoreau (Modern Critical Views) (1988).
Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the
Formation of American Culture (1995).
Cain, William E., ed. A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau (2000).
Cavell, Walden. The Senses of Walden (1992). [philosophical reading]
Clark, Timothy. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature of the Environment
(2011). [see chapter on Walden]
Edel, Leon. Henry D. Thoreau (1970).
Gayet, Claude. The Intellectual Development of Henry David Thoreau (1981).
Harding, Walter et al, eds. Henry David Thoreau: Studies and Commentaries
(1972).
Hildebidle, John. Thoreau: A Naturalist’s Liberty (1983).
Knott, John. Imagining Wild America (2004).
Mariotti, Shannon L. Thoreau’s Democratic Withdrawal: Alienation, Participation,
and Modernity (2010). [emphasis on political philosophy]
Myers, Joel, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau (1995).
Newman, Lance. Our Common Dwelling: Henry Thoreau, Transcendentalism and
the Class Politics of Nature (2005).
Novak, Barbara. Voyages of the Self: Pairs, Parallels, and Patterns in American Art
and Literature (2007). [see chapter on Thoreau and Indian selfhood]
Petrulionis, Sandra Harbert and Laura Dassow Walls. More Day to Dawn: Thoreau’s
Walden for the Twenty-first Century (2006).
Porte, Joel. Consciousness and Culture: Emerson and Thoreau Reviewed (2004).
Robert D. Richardson, Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (1988). [biography]
Schneider, Richard J. Thoreau’s Sense of Place: Essays in American Environmental
Writing (2000).
Turner, Jack. A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau (2009).
Walls, Laura Dassow. Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and NineteenthCentury Natural Science (1995).
III: Style, Self and Society
General material on the Gilded Age (also note that the journal American Literary
Realism focuses particularly on this period).
Ammons, Elizabeth. Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into
the Twentieth Century (1991).
Banta, Martha. Imagining American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History
(1987). [Portraiture, visuals, fashion and representation]
Bender, Bert. The Descent of Love: Darwin and the Theory of Sexual Selection in
American Fiction, 1871-1916 (1996). [Scientific discourses of the period]
Brogan, Hugh. History of the United States (2001). [esp. Book 4, ‘The Age of
Gold’]
Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (2003).
[Cultural history]
Chandler, Marilyn R. Dwelling in the Text: Houses in American Fiction (1991).
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins [Stetson]. Women and Economics (1898). [Groundbreaking study on e.g. the woman as ‘trophy wife’]
Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism (1988).
Levine, Jessica. Delicate Pursuit: Discretion in Henry James and Edith Wharton
(2002).
Messent, Peter. New Readings in the American Novel: Narrative Theory and Its
Application (1990; rev. 1998). [The Portrait of a Lady and The House of
Mirth, via Roland Barthes]
Nettels, Elsa. Language and Gender in American Fiction: Howells, James, Wharton
and Cather (1996).
Nye, David E. ‘Industrialization, Business and Consumerism’ in Modern American
Culture: An Introduction (1993) ed. Mick Gidley.
Pizer, Donald, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism
(1995).
Stange, Margit, Personal Property: Wives, White Slaves and the Market in Women
(1998). [Wharton and Chopin]
Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). [Pioneering sociological
work on ‘Conspicuous Consumption’ and ‘Conspicuous Leisure’]
Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady
Text: Oxford World’s Classics series, ed. Roger Luckhurst, 2009. You may,
however, use any convenient edition, but check whether you are reading
the first book version (1881) or the later text. If you are interested in
looking at the original serial publication, go to the Making of America,
<http://digital.library.cornell.edu/moa>. Then to: Journals: The Atlantic
Monthly, November 1880, to start with the first instalment.
The ‘Henry James Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites’ is another excellent resource:
<http://www2.newpaltz.edu/~hathaway/>
Allen, Elizabeth. A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James (1984).
Blackmur, R.P. Introd. Henry James: The Art of the Novel (1934). [collected
prefaces]
Cameron, Sharon. Thinking in Henry James (1989).
Cannon, Kelly. Henry James and Masculinity: The Man at the Margins (1994)
Freedman, Jonathan, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Henry James (1998).
Graham, Kenneth. Henry James: A Literary Life (1994). [introductory]
Griffin, Susan M., ed. Henry James Goes to the Movies (2002).
James, Henry. The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism. Ed. Roger Gard
(1987). [Useful selection of James’s own writings about literature]
Kress, Jill M. The Figure of Consciousness: William James, Henry James, and Edith
Wharton (2002).
Lustig, T. J. Henry James and the Ghostly (1994).
Meissner, Colin. Henry James and the Language of Experience (1999).
Otten, Thomas J. A Superficial Reading of Henry James: Preoccupations with the
Material World (2006).
Person, Leland S. Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity (2003).
Poole, Adrian. Henry James (1991). [short introduction]
Porte, Joel, ed. New Essays on ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ (1990).
Rawlings, Peter, ed. Henry James and the Abuse of the Past (2005).
---. Palgrave Advances in Henry James Studies (2007).
Salmon, Richard. Henry James and the Culture of Publicity (1997).
Woolf, Judith. Henry James: The Major Novels (1991). [general introduction]
Zacharias, Greg. W. A Companion to Henry James (2008).
Edith Wharton General (note that the Library takes the print form of The Edith
Wharton Review).
Beer, Janet. Edith Wharton (2002).
Bell, Millicent, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton (1996).
Bloom, Harold, ed. Edith Wharton (Modern Critical Views) (1986).
Boswell, Ann. Edith Wharton on Film (2007).
Dwight, Eleanor. Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life (1994).
---. The Gilded Age: Edith Wharton and Her Contemporaries (1996) [pictorial
insights into EW’s life, times, travels and cultural vistas]
Fedorko, Kathy. Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton (1995).
[Opens up dimensions beyond Realism.]
Fryer, Judith. Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and
Willa Cather (1986).
Joslin, Katherine. Edith Wharton (1991).
Kassanoff, Jennie A. Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race (2004).
Killoran, Helen. Edith Wharton: Art and Allusion (1996).
---. The Critical Reception of Edith Wharton (2001).
Knights, Pamela. The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton (2009).
---. ‘Edith Wharton’. A Companion to Twentieth-Century United States Fiction, ed.
David Seed. (2010).
---. 'Edith Wharton's "Venetian Backgrounds"'. Venice and the Cultural Imagination,
ed. Michael O'Neill, Mark Sandy, and Sarah Wootton (2012).
Kress, Jill M. The Figure of Consciousness: William James, Henry James and Edith
Wharton (2002).
Lee, Hermione. Edith Wharton (2007). [Now the standard literary life]
Lewis, R. W. B. Edith Wharton: A Biography (1997)[standard before Lee]
Montgomery, Maureen E. Displaying Women: Spectacles of Leisure in Edith
Wharton’s New York (1998). [Cultural history.]
Orland, Emily J. Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts (2006).
Papke, Mary E. Verging on the Abyss: The Social Fiction of Kate Chopin and Edith
Wharton (1990).
Preston, Claire. Edith Wharton’s Social Register (2000).
Rattray, Laura, ed. Edith Wharton in Context (2012).
Singley, Carol J., ed. A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton (2003).
Tuttleton, James W, Kristin O. Lauer and Margaret P. Murray, eds. Edith Wharton:
The Contemporary Reviews (1992).
Waid, Candace. Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld: Fictions of Women
and Writing (1991).
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. A Feast of Words. The Triumph of Edith Wharton (1977).
[influential early Freudian approach]
The House of Mirth
Text: No controversies about this text, so use any convenient edition; searchable
first edition online via ‘Text Archive’.
Beer, Janet, Pamela Knights and Elizabeth Nolan. Edith Wharton’s ‘The House of
Mirth’ (2007). [Readings on the Gothic, sexuality, genre, illustration,
rewritings, adaptations; annotated bibliography]
Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body. Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic
(1992) [Ch. 13. ‘Rigor has set in: the wasted bride’]
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan. No Man’s Land: The Place of Woman Writer
in the Twentieth Century, Vol. II, ‘Sexchanges’ (1989).
Hochman, Barbara. ‘The Awakening and The House of Mirth: Plotting Experience
and Experiencing Plot’. The Cambridge Companion to Realism and
Naturalism, ed. Donald Pizer (1995).
Howard, Maureen. ‘The House of Mirth: The Bachelor and the Baby’ in The
Cambridge Companion to E.W., ed. Millicent Bell (1995).
Hughes, Clair. Dressed in Fiction (2006). [Ch. 8 ‘Consuming Clothes: Edith
Wharton’s The House of Mirth]
Singley, Carol, ed. Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth: A Casebook (2003).
Showalter, Elaine. Sister’s Choice (1989). [Ch. 5, ‘The Death of the Lady
(Novelist): Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth’]
Totten, Gary, ed. Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and
Material Culture (2007). [See esp. Chs. 5, 7, and 9 – essays on ‘Picturing
Lily’, consumerism and ‘the bachelor girl’.]
Film: The House of Mirth. Dir. Terence Davies (2000). Starring Gillian Anderson.
Ethan Frome
Text: Many available, and no disputes, except for the crucial representation of the
long ellipses between ‘sections’. The lecture will refer to the 2004 new
Wordsworth edition (introduction and notes by Pamela Knights); see also
Norton Critical edition (introduction by Elizabeth Ammons); or online at
Text Archive (first edition).
Banta, Martha. ‘The Ghostly Gothic of Wharton’s Everyday World’. American
Literary Realism 1870-1910. 27.1 (1994).
Bernard, Kenneth. ‘Imagery and Symbolism in Ethan Frome’ (1961), Readings on
‘Ethan Frome’, ed. Christopher Smith (details below).
Blackall, Jean Frantz. ‘Edith Wharton’s Art of Ellipsis’. Journal of Narrative
Technique. 17. (1987). [Extracts in Norton Critical Ed]
Farland, Maria Magdalena. ‘Ethan Frome and the “Springs” of Masculinity’, Modern
Fiction Studies 42.4 (1996).
MacCallan, W.D. ‘The French Draft of Ethan Frome’. Yale University Library
Gazette. 27.1 (1953). [Wharton’s first attempt at this story]
Smith, Christopher, ed. Readings on ‘Ethan Frome’ (2000) [anthology of essays
exemplifying various critical approaches. Note: some are edited extracts.]
Wharton, Edith. The Uncollected Critical Writings, ed. Frederick Wegener (1996)
[for Wharton’s commentaries on Ethan Frome].
Film: Ethan Frome. Dir. John Madden (1993). Starring Liam Neeson and Patricia
Arquette.
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night
Text: The Great Gatsby Penguin; or Wordsworth (good introduction and notes by
Guy Reynolds); Tender is the Night Wordsworth or Penguin Classic [In the
case of Tender is the Night please check that you are using the 1934 edition
which opens with the Riviera scene]
Berman, Ronald. The Great Gatsby and Modern Times (1994).
Blazek, William and Laura Rattray, eds. Twenty-First Century Readings of Tender
is
the Night (2007).
Bruccoli, Matthew J. and Judith S. Baughman. A Reader’s Companion to F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s ‘Tender is the Night’ (1996).
---. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1981).
---. F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship (1996).
Holquist, Michael, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (1990). [see final chapter on
Gatsby]
Hook, Andrew. F.Scott-Fitzgerald: A Literary Life (2002).
Jackson, R. Bryer, Alan Margolies, and Ruth Prigozy, eds. F. Scott-Fitzgerald: New
Perspectives (2000).
Le Vot, André, trans. W. Byron. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (1983).
Meyers, Jeffrey. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (1994).
Matterson, Stephen. The Great Gatsby (1990) [Student guide. Useful starting point]
O’Meara, Lauraleigh. Lost City: Fitzgerald’s New York (2002).
Parkinson, Kathleen. F. Scott-Fitzgerald: Tender is the Night: A Critical Study
(1986).
Prigozy, Ruth, ed. The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald (2002).
Tredell, Nicholas. F. Scott Fitzgerald: ‘The Great Gatsby’ (1999). [Critical guide]
Way, Brian. Scott Fitzgerald and the Art of Social Fiction (1980).
IV. Telling 'The South' – Reading through Race and Region
Nineteenth Century Slave Narratives
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American
Slave
Text: (online Project Gutenberg) or any printed.
Fisch, Audrey, ed. Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative
(2007
McFeely, William S. Frederick Douglass (1991).
Reising, Russell. The Unusable Past (1986). [Douglass as alternative to white
canon]
Rice, Alan, Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (2003).
Rice, Alan and Martin Crawford, eds. Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass
(1999).
Smith, Valerie. Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (1987).
Stauffer, John, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the
Transformation of
Race (2002).
Sundquist, Eric, ed. Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays (1990).
Sweeney, Fionnghuala. Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World (2007).
Tawil, Ezra J. The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the
Frontier
Romance (2006).
Wood, Marcus, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and
America,
1780-1865 (2000).
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Text: (online Project Gutenberg) or any printed.
Bauer, Dale and Philip Gould, ed. The Cambridge Companion to NineteenthCentury
American Women’s Writing (2001).
Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American
Woman
Novelist (1987).
Garfield, Deborah M., and Rafia Zafar, eds. Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the
Life of a Slave Girl: New Critical Essays (1996).
Jones, Jacqueline. Labour of Love, Labour of Sorrow: Black Women from Slavery
to the
Present (1985).
McKay, Nellie Y., and Frances Smith Foster, eds. Incidents in the Life of a Slave
Girl: Contexts, Criticism (2001).
Nelson, Dana D. The Word in Black and White: Reading Race in American
Literature, 16381867 (1992). [ch. 7 on Jacobs]
Washington, Mary Helen. Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860-1960
(1987).
Yellin, Jean Fagan. Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American
Culture
(1989).
---. Harriet Jacobs: A Life (2004).
Southern Myths and Fictions
To set Faulkner and Morrison in context, we shall try to offer a survey of some
‘popular’ images of the South from fiction and film. As part of this
overview, the lecture will refer to Margaret Mitchell’s blockbuster romance
Gone With the Wind (1936) and the 1939 film adaptation of the novel. Kate
Chopin’s short fiction ‘Désirée’s Baby’ (1893) will also be looked at in terms
of Southern myths and anxieties.
General:
Ayers, Edward L. and Bradley L. Mittendorf. The Oxford Book of the American
South:
Testimony, Memory and Fiction (1997). [for dipping]
Gray, Richard, and Owen Robinson, eds. A Companion to the Literature and
Culture of the
American South (2004).
Roberts, Diane. The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region
(1994).
For Kate Chopin’s short story ‘Désirée’s Baby’ see the Oxford World’s Classics
The
Awakening and Other Stories (2000) (edited and introduced by Pamela Knights).
Alternatively, you will find a free, reliable web edition at Project Gutenberg
within The
Awakening and Selected Short Stories volume.
Bauer, Dale and Philip Gould, ed. The Cambridge Companion to NineteenthCentury
American Women’s Writing (2001).
Beer, Janet, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin (2008).
--. Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short
Fiction (2005).
Jones, Anne Goodwyn. ‘Kate Chopin: The Life Behind the Mask’. Tomorrow is
Another
Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859-1936 (1981). [Useful early introduction]
Ostman Heather. Kate Chopin in the Twenty-first Century: New Critical Essays
(2008).
Showalter, Elaine. Sister’s Choice (1989).
Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in NineteenthCentury
America (1985).
Taylor, Helen, Gender, Race and Region in the Writings of Grace King, Ruth
McEnery
Stuart and Kate Chopin (1989).
Toth, Emily. Kate Chopin (1990). [The standard biography]
---. and Per Seyersted. Kate Chopin’s Private Papers (1998). [Letters, diaries, short
sketches, juvenilia]
Walker, Nancy A. Kate Chopin: A Literary Life (2001).
Margaret Mitchell: Gone With the Wind
Text: any available.
Cripps, Thomas. Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American film, 1900-1942
(1977).
Gelfant, Blanche H. ‘Gone With the Wind and the Impossibilities of Fiction’ in
Women Writing in America: Voices in Collage (1984). [Stimulating
examination of the contradictions, repressions and complexities of the
novel]
Jones, Anne Goodwyn. Tomorrow is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South,
18591936 (1981). [Good general starting point]
MacKethan, Lucinda H. Daughters of Time: Creating Woman’s Voice in Southern
Story
(1990).
Pauly, Thomas H. ‘Gone With the Wind and The Grapes of Wrath as Hollywood
Histories of
the Great Depression’ in Hollywood’s America: United States History Through Its
Films,
ed. Steven Mintz and Randy Roberts. (3rd. ed. 2001).
Pines, Jim. Blacks in Film (1975).
Silk, Catherine and John. Racism and Anti-Racism in American Popular Culture:
Portrayals
of African-Americans in Fiction and Film (1990).
Smith, Lillian. Killers of the Dream (1949). [esp. the chapter ‘Three Ghost Stories’.
Reflections on the white southern psyche by a white southern woman – historically
well in
advance of its time]
Taylor, Helen. Scarlett’s Women: ‘Gone With the Wind’ and Its Female Fans
(1989).
[Useful starting point for many southern motifs and problems]
Film: Gone with the Wind. Dir. Victor Fleming and George Cukor (1939). Starring
Vivien
Leigh and Clark Gable.
William Faulkner and Toni Morrison together:
Dussere, Erik. Balancing the Books: Faulkner, Morrison and the Economies of
Slavery (2003).
Kolmerten, Carol A, Stephen M. Ross and Judith Bryant Wittenberg, eds.
Unflinching Gaze: Morrison and Faulkner Re-envisioned (1997).
Weinstein, Philip. What Else But Love? The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and
Morrison (1997). [Interweaving of criticism on both these writers]
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
Text: Absalom, Absalom!: The Corrected Text (Vintage).
Peek, Charles A. ‘William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha’. A Companion to TwentiethCentury
United States Fiction, ed. David Seed (2010).
Matthews, John T. William Faulkner: Seeing through the South (2009).
Towner, Theresa M. The Cambridge Introduction to William Faulkner (2008)
Abernathy, Jeff. To Hell and Back: Race and Betrayal in the Southern Novel
(2003).
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (1984). [Has
an
interesting chapter on Absalom!]
Fargnoli, A. Nicholas and Michael Golay, eds. William Faulkner A to Z: The
Essential
Reference to His Life and Work (2002).
Gray, Richard. The Life of William Faulkner (1994). [Overview of writings and life]
Hamblin, Robert W., and Charles A. Peek. A William Faulkner Encyclopaedia
(1999).
Hannon, Charles. Faulkner and the Discourses of Culture (2005).
Hobson, Fred, ed. William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!: A Casebook (2003).
Labatt, Blair. Faulkner the Storyteller (2005).
Minter, David. A Cultural History of the American Novel: Henry James to William
Faulkner
(1994). [Short section, showing larger contexts]
Moreland, Richard C., ed. A Companion to William Faulkner (2007). [Online]
Peek, Charles A, and Robert W. Hamblin, eds. A Companion to Faulkner Studies
(2004).
[Chapters on different critical and theoretical approaches]
Rio-Jelliffe, R. Obscurity's Myriad Components: The Theory and Practice of William
Faulkner (2001).
Roberts, Diane. Faulkner and the Myth of Southern Womanhood (1994). [also
useful for general Southern motifs]
Robinson, Owen. Creating Yoknapatawpha: Readers and Writers in Faulkner's
Fiction
(2006).
Weinstein, Philip M. Faulkner’s Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns (1992).
--- ed. The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner (1995).
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Text: any available.
Andrews, William L, and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A
Casebook (1999).
Bloom, Harold, ed. Toni Morrison (2002).
Conner, Marc C, ed. The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the
Unspeakable (2000).
Ferguson, Rebecca. ‘History, Memory and Language in Toni Morrison’s Beloved’ in
Susan Sellers, ed., Feminist Criticism: Theory and Practice.
---. Rewriting Black Identities: Transition and Exchange in the Novels of Toni
Morrison
(2007).
Furman, Jan. Toni Morrison’s Fiction (1996).
Gates, Henry Louis, and K.A. Appiah, eds. Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives
Past and Present (1993).
Grewal, Gurleen, Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni
Morrison (1998).
Matus, Jill. Toni Morrison (1998).
McKay, Nellie, ed. Critical Essays on Toni Morrison (1988).
Middleton, David L., ed. Toni Morrison’s Fiction: Contemporary Criticism (1997).
Morrison, Toni. What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction ed. by Carolyn
Denard (2008).
Nicholls, Peter. ‘The Belated Postmodern: History, Phantoms, and Toni Morrison’
in Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reader ed. by Sue Vice (1996).
Page, Philip. Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and Fragmentation in Toni Morrison’s
Novels (1995).
Plasa, Carl, ed. Beloved (1998). [overview of criticism to that date, with full
bibliography]
Roynon, Tessa. The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison (2013)
Solomon, Barbara H, ed. Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1998).
Stave, Shirley, ed. Toni Morrison and the Bible: Contested Intertextualities (2006).
Tally, Justine, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison (2007).
Terry, Jennifer. ‘Toni Morrison’, in A Companion to Twentieth-Century United
States
Fiction, ed. David Seed (2010).
Weisenburger, Steven. Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and ChildMurder from
the Old South (1998.) [Examines the case of Margaret Garner]
There are Special Issues of Studies in the Literary Imagination (1998), African
American Review (2001), Modern Fiction Studies (1993 and 2006) and MELUS
(2011) on Toni Morrison.
African American Literature – General (useful for the Slave Narratives and Toni
Morrison)
Baker, Houston. Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s
Writings (1991).
Bell, W. Bernard. The Afro-American Novel and its Tradition (1987).
--. The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern
Literary Branches (2004).
Christian, Barbara, Black Woman Novelists (1980).
---. Black Feminist Criticism (1985).
Evans, Mari. Black Women Writers at Work (1983).
Gates, H. L. ‘Writing “Race” and the Difference It Makes’, Critical Inquiry, 12.1
(1983).
---. Black American Literature and Literary Theory (1984).
---. The Signifying Monkey (1988).
Gates, Henry Louis, and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. The Norton Anthology of African
American Literature (2004).
Giddings, Paula. Where and When I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and
Sex in America (1984).
Graham, Maryemma, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel
(2004).
Grice, Helena et al, eds. Beginning Ethnic American Literatures (2001).
[Chapter 3 provides a very useful starting point]
Jones, Gayle. Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature
(1991).
McDowell, Deborah E. and Rampersad, Arnold. Slavery and the Literary
Imagination (1989).
Plasa, Carl, and Ring, Betty J, eds. The Discourse of Slavery: Aphra Behn to Toni
Morrison (1994).
Russell, Sandi. Render Me My Song: African-American Women Writers from Slavery
to the
Present (new ed., 2002). [Useful starting point]
Terry, Jennifer. ‘Shuttles in the Rocking Loom’: Mapping the Black Diaspora in
African American and Caribbean Fiction (2013).
Willis, Susan. ‘Black Women Writers: Taking a Critical Perspective,’ in Gayle
Greene and Coppeliaed Kahn, eds. Making a Difference: Feminist Literary
Criticism (1985).
---. Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience (1987).
V. Post-war Promise / Post-war Paranoia
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Text: Penguin Classics (introduction by Ann Charters).
Abel, Marco. ‘Speeding Across the Rhizome: Deleuze Meets Kerouac On the Road’.
MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 48.1 (2002). [theoretical reading. via Project
Muse]
Cunnell, Howard, ed. Jack Kerouac: On the Road: The Original Scroll (2007). [JK’s
original format].
Ellis, R. J. Liar! Liar!: Jack Kerouac Novelist (1999).
Gair, Christopher. The American Counterculture (2007). [good general resource,
see section on the Beats]
Holton, Robert. ‘Kerouac Among the Fellahin: On The Road To The Postmodern’.
MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 1.2 (1996). [via Project Muse]
Hunt, Tim. Kerouac’s Crooked Road: The Development of a Fiction (1996).
Hrebeniak, Michael. Action Writing: Jack Kerouac's Wild Form (2006).
Lee, A. Robert. Modern American Counter Writing (2010).
Malcolm, Douglas. ‘“Jazz America”: Jazz and African American Culture in Jack
Kerouac’s On the Road’, Contemporary Literature 40.1 (1999).
Martinez, Manuel Luis. Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to
Tomas Rivera (2003). [Kerouac and the Beats reinterpreted in light of
Chicano studies]
Mikelli, Eftychia. ‘“Passing Everybody and Never Halting”: Dromos and Speed in
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road’, Cultural Politics, 8.1 (2012). [via Project
Muse]
Nicosia, Gerald. Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac (1983).
Theado, Matt. Understanding Jack Kerouac (2000).
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Text: Any available.
Ashe, Marie. ‘The Bell Jar and the Ghost of Ethel Rosenberg’ in Secret Agents: The
Rosenberg Case, McCarthyism and Fifties America, ed. Marjorie Garber and
Rebecca L. Walkowitz 1995).
Axelrod, Stephen Gould. Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words (1992).
Baldwin, Kate. ‘The Radical Imaginary of The Bell Jar’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction
(Fall 2004).
Gill, Jo, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath (2006).
Nelson, Deborah. Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (2002).
Peel, Robin. Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics (2002).
Rose, Jacqueline. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1993).
Saul Bellow, Herzog and Mr Sammler’s Planet
Texts: Any available.
Clayton, John Jacob. Saul Bellow: In Defense of Man (1968).
Cohen, Sarah B. Saul Bellow’s Enigmatic Laugh (1974).
Cronin, Gloria L., and L. H. Goldman, eds. Saul Bellow in the 1980s: A Collection
of Critical Essays (1989).
Cronin, Gloria L. A Room of His Own: In Search of the Feminine in Saul Bellow
(2000).
Goldman, L. H., Gloria L. Cronin, and Ada Aharoni, eds. Saul Bellow: A Mosaic
(1992).
Fuchs, Daniel, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision (1984).
Hyland, Peter, Saul Bellow (1992).
Malin, Irving, Saul Bellow and the Critics (1967).
Newman, Judie, Saul Bellow and History (1984).
Pifer, Ellen, Saul Bellow: Against the Grain (1990).
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Text: any available.
Note that out-of-print back issues of the journal Pynchon Notes are available as
PDFs online.
Abbas, Niran, ed. Thomas Pynchon: Reading from the Margins (2003).
Berressem, Hanjo. Pynchon's Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text (1993).
Bloom, Harold (ed.). Thomas Pynchon (Modern Critical Views) (1986).
Chambers, Judith. Thomas Pynchon (1992).
Cooper, Peter. Signs and Symptoms: Thomas Pynchon and the Contemporary World
(1981).
Copestake, Ian D., ed. American Postmodernity: Essays on the Recent Fiction of
Thomas Pynchon (2003).
Cowart, David. Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion (1980).
-- Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History (2011).
Dalsgaard, Inger H et al, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon
(2012).
Dugdale, John. Thomas Pynchon: Allusive Parables of Power (1990).
Grant, J Kerry. A Companion to The Crying of Lot 49 (1994).
Hite, Molly. Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (1983).
Levine, George and David Leverenz, eds. Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas
Pynchon (1976).
Madsen, Deborah. The Postmodernist Allegories of Thomas Pynchon (1991).
Maltby, Paul. Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon (1991).
Mangen, Anne and Rolf Gaasland, eds. Blissful Bewilderment: Studies in the
Fiction of Thomas Pynchon (2002).
Mattessich, Stefan. Lines of Flight: Discursive Time and Countercultural Desire in
the work of Thomas Pynchon (2002).
Mendelson, Edward, ed. Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays (1978).
Palmeri, Frank. Satire in Narrative: Petronius, Swift, Gibbon, Melville, and
Pynchon (1990).
Pearce, Richard, ed. Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon (1981).
Plater, William M. The Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon (1978).
O’Donnell, Patrick, ed. New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49 (1991).
Tanner, Tony. Thomas Pynchon (1982).
Thomas, Samuel. Pynchon and the Political (2007).
Witzling, David. Everybody’s America: Thomas Pynchon, Race, and the Cultures of
Postmodernity (2008).
Don DeLillo, White Noise
Text: Any available.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Don DeLillo (Modern Critical Views) (2003).
Boxall, Peter. Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction (2006)
Cowart, David. Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language (2003).
DePietro, Thomas. Conversations with Don DeLillo (2005).
Duval, John Noel, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo (2008).
Kavadlo, Jesse. Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief (2004).
Laist, Randy. Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity in Don DeLillo’s Novels
(2010).
Lentricchia, Frank, ed. New Essays on White Noise (1991).
---. ed. Introducing Don DeLillo (1991).
Orr, Leonard. Don DeLillo’s ‘White Noise’: A Reader’s Guide (2003).
Osteeen, Mark. American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture
(2000)
---. ‘Don DeLillo’ in A Companion to Twentieth-Century United States Fiction, ed.
David Seed. (2010).
Ruppersburg, Hugh and Tim Engles, eds. Critical Essays on Don DeLillo (2000).
Tanner, Tony. The American Mystery: American Literature from Emerson to
DeLillo (2000).
Contemporary American Women’s Short Stories
Texts: You do not need to buy primary texts for this lecture topic but, if you
wished, in advance you could consult Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering
Creek and Other Stories (1991); Lorrie Moore, The Collected Stories (2009);
and Grace Paley, The Collected Stories (1999).
Boddy, Kasia. The American Short Story Since 1950 (2010).
Brown, Julie, ed. Ethnicity and the American Short Story (1997).
Brown, Julie, ed. American Women Short Story Writers: A Collection of Critical
Essays (1995).
Campbell, Neil, ed. American Youth Cultures (2004).
Farhat Iftekharruddin, ed. Speaking of the Short Story: Interviews with
Contemporary Writers (1997).
Ford, Richard, ed. The Granta Book of the American Short Story (1998).
Martin, Wendy, ed. More Stories We Tell: The Best Contemporary Short Stories by
North American Women (2004).
May, Charles, ed. The New Short Story Theories (1994).
Nagel, James. The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic
Resonance of Genre (2001).
Oates, Joyce Carole, ed. The Oxford Book of American Short Stories (1992).
Schofield, Martin. The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story (2006).
Shaw, Valerie. The Short Story: A Critical Introduction (1983).
Sternberg Perrakis, Phyllis, ed. Adventures of the Spirit: The Older Woman in the
Works of Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Other Contemporary Women
Writers (2007).
Welty, Eudora. The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews (1979).
Zamora, Lois Parkinson, ed. Contemporary American Women Writers: Gender,
Class, Ethnicity (1998).
Contemporary Women's Writing, 3, 2 (2009), Journal Special Issue: Grace Paley
Writing the World.
TV Nation: Reflecting on American Storytelling
The Wire (HBO: 2002-2008), Breaking Bad (AMC: 2008-2013) and Justified (FX:
2010-to the present)
Texts: The complete seasons of The Wire (1-5) and Breaking Bad (1-6) will be
available to borrow from the main library and from the department’s AV
collection (on a season-by- season basis). The same applies to seasons 1-4 of
Justified. Note that Breaking Bad and Justified are also available through
Netflix. Season 5 of Justified will eventually be available in the UK through
the Amazon Prime streaming service before its release on DVD.
If you are interested in exploring the relationship between Justified and the crime
fiction of Elmore Leonard, see Raylan (2012), ‘Fire in the Hole’ (2002, the
short story that inspired the pilot episode), Riding the Rap (1995) and
Pronto (1993).
David Simon’s Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991) provides some useful
background on crime and policing in Baltimore (written by the creator of
The Wire while working as a journalist).
Alvarez, Rafael. The Wire: Truth Be Told (2010). [Informative overview by staff
writer on the show]
Beck, Eric. ‘Respecting the Middle: The Wire’s Omar Little as Neoliberal
Subjectivity’, Rhizomes, 19 (2009). See
<http://www.rhizomes.net/issue19/beck.html>
Bell, Robert LeVertis and Paul M. Farber, eds. Criticism 52.3-4 (2010). [Special
issue devoted to The Wire, via Project Muse. Excellent selection all-round
but Fredric Jameson’s essay ‘Realism and Utopia in The Wire’ is particularly
good]
Beiler, Peter L. and Patrick A. McGuire. Tapping into The Wire: The Real Urban
Crisis (2012). [Uses The Wire to discuss real-world urban policy and public
health issues]
Bzdak, David, Joanna Crosby and Seth Vannatta, eds. The Wire and Philosophy:
This America, Man (2013).
Donnelly Ashley M. Renegade Hero or Faux Rogue: The Secret Traditionalism of
Television Bad Boys (2014). [See chapter on Breaking Bad]
Driver Thompson, Kecia. ‘“Deserve Got Nothing to Do with It”: Black Urban
Experience and the Naturalist Tradition in The Wire’, Studies in American
Naturalism, 7.1 (2012). [via Project Muse]
Chambers, Samuel. ‘Walter White is a Bad Teacher: Pedagogy, Partage, and
Politics in Season 4 of Breaking Bad’, Theory & Event 17.1 (2014) [via
Project Muse]
Jacobs, Jason and Steve Peacock, eds. Television Aesthetics and Style (2013). [See
William Rotham’s chapter ‘Justifying Justified’]
Joyce, Justin A. ‘The Warp, Woof, and Weave of This Story’s Tapestry Would
Foster the Illusion of Further Progress: Justified and the Evolution of
Western Violence’, Western American Literature, 47.2 (2012). [via Project
Muse]
Keeble, Arin and Ivan Stacy, eds. American Realism in a Time of Terror and Crisis:
New Essays on The Wire (2014). [Highly recommended]
Koepsell, David R. and Robert Arp. Breaking Bad and Philosophy: Badder Living
Through Chemistry (2012).
Lotz, Amanda D. Cable Guys: Television and Masculinities in the 21st Century
(2014). [Recommended, especially re. Breaking Bad]
Martin, Brett. Difficult Men: From the Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and
Breaking Bad: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution (2013).
Metcalf, Greg. The DVD Novel: How the Way We Watch Television Changed the
Television We Watch (2012). [Good on narrative form, viewing habits and
‘novelistic’ properties of recent US TV]
Mittell, Jason. Television and American Culture (2009). [Good general resource]
Potter, Tiffany and C.W. Marshall, eds. The Wire: Urban Decay and American
Television (2009). [Highly recommended]
Sharma, Ash, ed. ‘The Wire Files’, Dark Matter: In the Ruins of Imperial Culture 4
(2011). [Special issue of journal. Another excellent selection]. See
<http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/category/issues/4-the-wire/>
Shuster, Martin. ‘“Boyd and I Dug Coal Together”: Norms, Persons, and Being
Justified in Justified’, MLN, 127.5 (2012). [via Project Muse]
Vest, Jason P. The Wire, Deadwood, Homicide, and NYPD Blue: Violence is Power
(2011).
Vint, Sherryl. The Wire (2013).
Whitt, David and John Perlich, eds. Myth in the Modern World: Essays on
Intersections with Ideology and Culture (2014). [See chapters by Lisa
Weckerle on Breaking Bad and Aaron Duncan on Justified]
Žižek, Slavoj. The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (2012). [Theoretical work. See
chapter 8 ‘The Wire, Or, What to Do in Non Evental-Times’]
AMERICAN FICTION
LECTURE LIST 2014/2015
Lectures will take place every Monday from 4:00pm to 5:00pm in Elvet Riverside
201.
Michaelmas Term 2014
6 October
The American 'Multiverse': Approaching US Fiction
Dr Thomas
I: Searching for the USA: Visions / Voices / Identities
13 October
Making an American Book: Charles Brockden Brown,
Wieland (1798) and Mark Twain, Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Overview lecture: Cowboys, Gender and the Vanishing
Frontier: Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage
(1912) and Annie Proulx, Close Range: Wyoming
Stories (1999)
Overview lecture: ‘Out of the Silence’: Native American
Literary Identities: James Fenimore Cooper, Last of
the Mohicans (1826) and Louise Erdrich, Love
Medicine (1993)
II: American Renaissance / American Rebels
Dr Grausam
3 November
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter (1850)
Dr Wootton
10 November
In the Name of the Devil: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
(1851)
Dr Thomas
17 November
The Nature of Resistance: Henry David Thoreau, ‘Civil
Disobedience’ (1849) and Walden (1854)
Dr Thomas
20 October
27 October
24 November
III: Style, Self and Society
III: Style, Self and Society
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
Dr Thomas
Dr Thomas
Professor James
1 December
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905) and Ethan Frome Dr Wootton
(1911)
8 December
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925) [with
references to Tender is the Night (1934)]
Dr Sandy
Epiphany Term 2014
IV: Telling 'The South’ – Reading through Race and
Region
12 January
Narratives of Slavery: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of
the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American
Slave (1845), and Harriet Jacobs [Linda Brent],
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
Dr Terry
19 January
Overview lecture: Southern Myths and Fictions: Kate
Chopin, ‘Désirée’s Baby’ (1893) and Gone with
the Wind (1936); film (1939)
Dr Terry
26 January
Tales from the Dark House: William Faulkner,
Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
Dr Grausam
2 February
'Not a story to pass on': Toni Morrison, Beloved (1988)
Dr Terry
9 February
READING WEEK
V: Post-war Promise / Post-war Paranoia
16 February
Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)
Professor Regan
23 February
The Cold War: Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)
Dr Grausam
2 March
Saul Bellow, Herzog (1963) [with references to Mr.
Sammler’s Planet (1970)]
Dr Grausam
9 March
Postal Politics: Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
(1966) [with references to Gravity’s Rainbow
(1973)]
Dr Thomas
Easter Term 2014
20 April
Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985)
Dr Grausam
27 April
Overview lecture: Youth and Age:
Contemporary American Women’s
Short Stories (Lorrie Moore, Grace
Paley and Sandra Cisneros)
Dr Terry
4 May
Overview lecture: TV Nation: Reflecting on
Dr Thomas
American Storytelling [will refer to TV
shows such as The Wire, Breaking Bad
and Justified)