Walker Percy

Percy, Walker - 1916–90, American novelist, b. Birmingham, Ala. Trained as a physician, Percy turned to writing after he contracted tuberculosis and was forced to retire from practice. His novels The Moviegoer (1961) and The Last Gentleman (1966) concern Southern gentlemen who are feeling the impact of changing times. Love in the Ruins (1971) is a science fiction satire. His other novels Read More...

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Walker Percy

1 .

Walker Percy
by Harold Bloom. 167 pgs.

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Modern Critical Views

Modern Critical Views Walker Percy

Contents

Editor's Note

Introduction

The Moviegoer and American Fiction: Wonder and Alienation

The Hero as "Case": the Last Gentleman

The Ruins of Consensus: Love in the Ruins

Walker Percy and Modern Gnosticism

Lancelot

Toward Home: Place, Language, and Death in the Last Gentleman

Narrative Triangulation in the Last Gentleman

Lancelot: Sign for the Times

Answers and Ambiguity in Percy's the Second Coming

Percy as Storyteller

Chronology

Contributors

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index
2 .

Following Percy: Essays on Walker Percy's Work
by Lewis A. Lawson. 245 pgs.

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"Taken together, these pieces document Lawson's own highly intersubjective encounters with the characters who people Percy's world. Lawson knows the workings of that world in a way few can match . . . (he) writes a well-crafted and unfailingly lucid criticism."—SEWANEE REVIEW

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Title Page

Acknowledgements

Contents

A Personal Note from the Author

Walker Percy's Indirect Communications

Notes

Walker Percy's Southern Stoic

Notes

The Moviegoer and the Stoic Heritage

Notes

Walker Percy's the Moviegoer: the Cinema as Cave

Notes

Time and Eternity in the Moviegoer

Notes

English Romanticism . . . and 1930 Science in the Moviegoer

Notes

Walker Percy as Martian Visitor: the Message in the Bottle

Tom More: Cartesian Physician

Notes

Love in the Ruins: Sequel to Arrowsmith

Notes

Walker Percy's Silent Character

Notes

The Gnostic Vision in Lancelot

Notes

Gnosis and Time in Lancelot

Notes

Walker Percy's Physicians and Patients

Notes

Index
3 .

Walker Percy's Feminine Characters
by Lewis A. Lawson, Elzbieta H. Oleksy. 141 pgs.

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"Percy's descriptions of women seem to owe much to that male perspective which is so typical of the southern cultural tradition. He has been criticized for creating female characters who never develop beyond the level of cliche and who only serve a function with regard to the male protagonists. 'Walker Percy's Feminine Characters' is designed to provide a more coherent perspective on this issue than could be found so far. . . ."—The International Fiction Review

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Contents

Introduction

Works Cited

The Dream Screen in the Moviegoer

Notes

Works Cited

Gesture and Style in the Moviegoer

Notes

The Exclusionary Nature of the Moviegoer

Notes

Keeping Quentin Compson Alive: the Last Gentleman, the Second Coming, and the Problems of Masculinity

Notes

"The Cave . . . the Fence": a Lacanian Reading of Walker Percy's the Second Coming

Notes

The Privilege of Maternity: Teaching Language and Love in the Second Coming

Notes

Rereading Allison Huger: Making Silence Signify in the Second Coming

Notes

Works Cited

A Gentleness with Women: Loving, Caring, and Sexual Dilemmas in Walker Percy's Fiction

Notes

From Silence and Madness to the Exchange That Multiplies: Walker Percy and the Woman Question

Notes

Works Cited

Contributors

Index
4 .

The Last Physician: Walker Percy and the Moral Life of Medicine
by Carl Elliott, John D. Lantos. 172 pgs.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Dr. Percy's Hold on Medicine

The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes

Why Doctors Make Good Protagonists

Notes

From Eye to Ear in Percy's Fiction: Changing the Paradigm for Clinical Medicine

Prozac and the Existential Novel: Two Therapies

Notes

Ethics in the Ruins

Walker Percy and Medicine: The Struggle for Recovery in Medical Education

Now You Are One of Us: Gender, Reversal, and the Good Read

Inherited Depression, Medicine, and Illness in Walker Percy's Art

Pathology Rounds with Dr. Percy: The Modern Malaise, Its Causes and Cure

Walker Percy, Reluctant Physician

Afterword: Writing and Rewriting Stories

Contributors

Index
5 .

A Dangerous Crossing: French Literary Existentialism and the Modern American Novel (Chap. 5 "Into the Ruins: Saul Bellow and Walker Percy")
by Richard Lehan. 204 pgs.

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Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1: Man the Redeemer

2: French Literary Existentialism: Sartre and Camus

3: French and American Literary Existentialism Dos Passos, Hemingway, Faulkner

4: The Outer Limits: Norman Mailer and Richard Wright

5: Into the Ruins: Saul Bellow and Walker Percy

6: Man and His Fictions: Ellison, Pynchon, Heller, and Barth

Notes

Bibliographical Essay

Index
6 .

Testing the Faith: The New Catholic Fiction in America ("The Church and the Novelist" begins on p. 19)
by Anita Gandolfo. 223 pgs.

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Since 1965 there has been an explosion of fiction about being Catholic. This book, the first to consider post-Vatican II Catholic literature, provides an overview of fiction about the American Catholic experience. It considers emerging novelists such as Mary Gordon and Valerie Sayers, established writers like Paul Theroux, popular writers such as Andrew Greeley and William X. Keinzle, and the emergence of new, young writers such as Jeanne Schinto, Sheila O'Connor, and Philip Deaver. By analyzing patterns in their fiction, Gandolfo shows both the shared interest these writers have in the Catholic experience and their individual perspectives on that experience.

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Contents

Preface

1: Faith and Imagination

2: Visions of Experience

3: Visions of Passionate Intensity

4: Visions of Innocence Restored?

5: Visions of Reconciliation

6: Alternative Visions

7: Visions of Individualism

8: Prophetic Vision: The Spiritual Quest

9: Prophetic Vision: As We Are Now

10: Conclusion: Vision of a Changing Church

Bibliography

Index

About the Author
7 .

Fifty Southern Writers after 1900: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook ("Walker Percy" begins on p.19)
by Joseph M. Flora, Robert Bain. 630 pgs.

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..."The scholarship is meticulous and the essays are lucid and perceptive..." Library Journal

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Title Page

Copyright Acknowledgments

Contents

Introduction

James Agee (1909-1955)

Bibliography

A. R. Ammons (1926- )

Bibliography

John Barth (1930- )

Bibliography

Hamilton Basso (1904-1964)

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Doris Betts (1932- )

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John Peale Bishop (1892-1944)

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James Branch Cabell (1879-1958)

Erskine Caldwell (1903- )

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Truman Capote (1924-1984)

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Donald Grady Davidson (1893-1968)

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James Dickey (1923- )

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Ralph Ellison (1914- )

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William Faulkner (1897-1962)

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John Gould Fletcher (1886-1950)

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Shelby Foote (1916- )

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Ernest J. Gaines (1933- )

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Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945)

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Caroline Gordon (1895-1981)

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Shirley Ann Grau (1929- )

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Paul Green (1894-1981)

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Lillian Hellman (1905-1984)

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Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)

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Randall Jarrell (1914-1965)

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James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938)

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Andrew Lytle (1902- )

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Carson McCullers (1917-1967)

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H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

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Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949)

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Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)

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Walker Percy (1916- )

Bibliography

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980)

William Sydney Porter [O. Henry] (1862-1910)

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Reynolds Price (1933- )

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John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974)

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Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896-1953)

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Elizabeth Madox Roberts (1881-1941)

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Elizabeth Spencer (1921- )

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Jesse Stuart (1906-1984)

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William Styron (1925- )

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Allen Tate (1899-1979)

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Peter Taylor (1917- )

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Jean Toomer (1894-1967)

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Anne Tyler (1941- )

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Robert Penn Warren (1905- )

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Eudora Welty (1909- )

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Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams (1911-1983)

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Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938)

Bibliography

Richard Wright (1908-1960)

Bibliography

Stark Young (1881-1963)

Index

Contributors
8 .

Walker Percy's Twentieth-Century Thomism, in Perspectives on Political Science
by Peter Augustine Lawler. 7 pgs.

Journal Article

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9 .

John Kennedy Toole and Walker Percy: Fiction and Repetition in a Confederacy of Dunces, in Texas Studies in Literature and Language
by Richard Keller Simon. 18 pgs.

Journal Article

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10 .

Walker Percy: Novelist and Philosopher
by Jan Nordby Gretlund, Karl-Heinz Westarp. 256 pgs.

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Title Page

Walker Percy: Novelist and Philosopher

Contents

Foreword: Approving or Disapproving Eyes

Preface

Abbreviations

Part I: The Novelist

The Cross and the Delta: Walker Percy's Anthropology

Walker Percy's Enchanted Mountain

Two Conversations in Walker Percy's the Thanatos Syndrome: Text and Context

The Engineer, Then and Now; Or, Barrett's Choice

Will Barrett Redux?

Part II: Novelist and Regionalist

Percy Forerunners, Family History, and the Gothic Tradition

Tradition in Amber: Walker Percy's Lancelot as Southern Metafiction

On the Porch with Marcus Aurelius: Walker Percy's Stoicism

Elegies for Gentlemen: Walker Percy's the Last Gentleman and Eudora Welty's "The Demonstrators"

Part III: Novelist and Existentialist

Kierkegaard and Percy: by Word, Away from the Philosophical

Lancelot and Walker Percy's Dispute with Sartre Over Ontology

The "Darkness That is Part of Light": Lancelot and "The Grand Inquisitor"

Language, Suicide, and the Writer: Walker Percy's Advancement of William Faulkner

Man, Beast, and Others in Walker Percy

Lancelot and the Dynamics of the Intersubjective Community

Part IV: Novelist and Moralist

Walker Percy: the Novelist as Moralist

Walker Percy's Brave New World: the Thanatos Syndrome

"Father Smith's Confession" in the Thanatos Syndrome

Walker Percy's Demonic Vision

Pilgrim's Progress; Or, a Few Night Thoughts on Tenderness and the Will to Power

The Thanatos Syndrome: Walker Percy's Tribute to Flannery O'Connor

Notes

Contributors

Index
11 .

Critical Angles: European Views of Contemporary American Literature (Chap. 6 "The Exile of Binx Bolling Walker Percy's Moviegoer")
by Marc Chenetier. 251 pgs.

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Contents

Part 1: Wide Angles

1: The Real Thing Notes on an American Strategy

2: Modernism/Postmodernism Continuities of a "Split" Repertoire of Narrative Themes and Strategies

3: Yours Faithfully, the Author

4: The Author and the Reader in the Text

5: Figure and Ground in Modern American Poetry

Part Two: Applied Clinometrics

6: The Exile of Binx Bolling Walker Percy's Moviegoer

7: The Energy of an Absence Perfection as Useful Fiction in the Novels of Gaddis and Sorrentino

8: Between Latency and Knowledge Figures of Preinitiation in Nabokov and Balthus

9: "An Exact Precession" Leonardo, Gertrude, and Guy Davenport's Da Vinci's Bicycle

10: On the Pertinaciousness of the Father, the Son, and the Subject The Case of Donald Barthelme

11: Living On/Off the "Reserve" Performance, Interrogation, and Negativity in the Works of Raymond Carver

12: David Mamet, a Virtuoso of Invective

13: Sam Shepard Word and Image

Index
12 .

Walker Percy's Sacramental Landscapes: The Search in the Desert
by Allen Pridgen. 258 pgs.

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Contents

1: Introduction

2: The Predicament

3: The Last Gentleman

4: The Second Coming

5: Love in the Ruins

6: The Thanatos Syndrome

Epilogue: The Way Home

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Books	Journals	Magazines
Newspapers	Encyclopedia	Research Topics

Books	Journals	Magazines
Newspapers	Encyclopedia	Research Topics

Walker Percy

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