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"An addendum to W. M. Frohock's 'The Novel of Violence in America, 1920-1950' (1950), Shaw's volume further defines violence and provides lengthy essays on a novel by each of eight authors not covered by Frohock—Porter, Capote. Vonnegut, Doctorow, McCarthy, Morrison, Selby, and Ellis. . . ...

"An addendum to W. M. Frohock's 'The Novel of Violence in America, 1920-1950' (1950), Shaw's volume further defines violence and provides lengthy essays on a novel by each of eight authors not covered by Frohock—Porter, Capote. Vonnegut, Doctorow, McCarthy, Morrison, Selby, and Ellis. . . . Students and scholars dealing with any of the writers Shaw covers will appreciate his detailed essays on specific novels. Recommended for libraries supporting coursework in the modern novel at the upper-division undergraduate level and above."—Choice

Violent scenes in American fiction are not only brutal, bleak, and gratuitous, writes Michael Kowalewski. They are also, by turns, comic, witty, poignant, and sometimes, strangely enough, even terrifyingly beautiful. In this fascinating tour of American fiction, Kowalewski examines incidents ranging ...

Violent scenes in American fiction are not only brutal, bleak, and gratuitous, writes Michael Kowalewski. They are also, by turns, comic, witty, poignant, and sometimes, strangely enough, even terrifyingly beautiful. In this fascinating tour of American fiction, Kowalewski examines incidents ranging from scalpings and torture in The Deerslayer to fish feeding off human viscera in To Have and Have Not, to show how highly charged descriptive passages bear on major issues concerning a writer's craft. Instead of focusing on violence as a socio- cultural phenomenon, he explores how writers including Cooper, Poe, Crane, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wright, Flannery O'Connor, and Pynchon draw on violence in the realistic imagining of their works and how their respective styles sustain or counteract this imagining. Kowalewski begins by offering a new definition of realism, or realistic imagining, and the rhetorical imagination that seems to oppose it. Then for each author he investigates how scenes of violence exemplify the stylistic imperatives more generally at work in that writer's fiction. Using violence as the critical occasion for exploring the distinctive qualities of authorial voice, Deadly Musings addresses the question of what literary criticism is and ought to be, and how it might apply more usefully to the dynamics of verbal performance.

Reading Rape examines how American culture talks about sexual violence and explains why, in the latter twentieth century, rape achieved such significance as a trope of power relations.Through attentive readings of a wide range of literary and cultural representations of sexual assault--from ...

Reading Rape examines how American culture talks about sexual violence and explains why, in the latter twentieth century, rape achieved such significance as a trope of power relations.Through attentive readings of a wide range of literary and cultural representations of sexual assault--from antebellum seduction narratives and "realist" representations of rape in nineteenth-century novels to Deliverance, American Psycho, and contemporary feminist accounts--Sabine Sielke traces the evolution of a specifically American rhetoric of rape. She considers the kinds of cultural work that this rhetoric has performed and finds that rape has been an insistent figure for a range of social, political, and economic issues.Sielke argues that the representation of rape has been a major force in the cultural construction of sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, class, and indeed national identity. At the same time, her acute analyses of both canonical and lesser-known texts explore the complex anxieties that motivate such constructions and their function within the wider cultural imagination. Provoked in part by contemporary feminist criticism, Reading Rape also challenges feminist positions on sexual violence by interrogating them as part of the history in which rape has been a convenient and conventional albeit troubling trope for other concerns and conflicts.This book teaches us what we talk about when we talk about rape. And what we're talking about is often something else entirely: power, money, social change, difference, and identity.

This volume brings together specialists from different areas of medieval literary study to focus on attitudes toward women during the Middle Ages. The essays range from Old English literature to the Spanish Inquisition and encompass such genres as romance, chronicles, hagiography, and legal ...

This volume brings together specialists from different areas of medieval literary study to focus on attitudes toward women during the Middle Ages. The essays range from Old English literature to the Spanish Inquisition and encompass such genres as romance, chronicles, hagiography, and legal documents. In its use of well-known authors (Chaucer and Christine de Pizan) and lesser-known writers, this collection provides a rich and useful survey for researchers in women's studies and medieval literature.