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Showing 1 - 25 of 29 matches in All Departments
James M. Cain wrote some of the grittiest novels in American literature, including such classics as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and Mildred Pierce. James M. Cain: Hard-Boiled Mythmaker is a critical overview of the author's life, work, and legacy. An updated and expanded edition of two of David Madden's scholarly works on Cain, this new book improves upon the previous works by collecting the most essential writing on Cain by Madden into one volume. In addition to melding existing material, this work contains updated and new material, including fresh commentaries on later books, such as Rainbow's End, Cloud Nine, and The Enchanted Isle, as well as later film adaptations, including Butterfly. It also responds to 40 years' worth of criticism on Cain and reevaluates his influence. Providing an overview of all of Cain's fiction, including an analysis of the major themes of his entire literary career, the book also describes Cain's impact on and importance in 20th-century culture, film in particular. In addition to a biographical summary and thematic outline of Cain's nearly 50-year career, Madden and Mecholsky examine how Cain's works explore the nightmare consequences of the persistent American dream. Finally, Madden and Mecholsky consider Cain's technical innovations of the novel and survey the major film adaptations of Cain's novels. With its significant in-depth analysis and a foreword by Edgar-award winning author Max Allan Collins, this volume will be of interest to Cain scholars as well as anyone interested in 20th century American literature and film.
When the first edition of David Madden's A Primer of the Novel: For Readers and Writers was published more than twenty-five years ago, there were no other books of its kind available. Since then, many authors and editors have produced works that attempt the same comprehensive coverage of the genre. However, these works tend to be either written solely for writers or solely for readers. More often than not, those written for readers tend to be aimed at advanced students or critics of the novel. In this revised edition, David Madden, Charles Bane and Sean Flory have produced an updated work that is intended for a general readership including writers, teachers, and students who are just being introduced to the genre. This unique handbook provides a definition and history of the novel, a description of early narratives, and a discussion of critical approaches to this literary form. A Primer of the Novel also identifies terms, definitions, commentary, and examples in the form of quotations for almost 50 types of novels and 15 artistic techniques. A chronology of narrative in general and of the novel in particular-from 850 B. C. to the present-is also included, along with indexes to authors, titles, novel types and techniques, as well as a selective bibliography of criticism. Although all novel types present in the first edition are still represented, many have become more clearly defined. This revised edition also cites several types of novels that did not appear in the first edition, such as the graphic novel and the novel of Magical Realism. As well as keeping all of the original examples from representative texts, the authors have added new examples of more recent works. While this book was conceived for a general audience, it will be a valuable resource for students, teachers, and libraries. It may be used in any English literature courses at any level, including graduate, and is suited for creative writing courses as well. With its clear and immediately accessible features, this handbo
This is a rich yet succinct account of an underexplored story: the consequences of the Great War for the region which ignited it. It offers a fascinating tapestry: the collapse of Empires, the birth of Turkey and Yugoslavia, Greece as both victor and loser, Bulgaria's humiliating defeat; bitter memories, forced migrations, territorial implications and collective national amnesias. The legacies live on. The contributions in this volume significantly enhance the debate about how the Great War is remembered in South East Europe, and why it still evokes such strong emotions and reactions, more than a century after its beginnings.
Everyone needs and deserves housing. But today our homes are being transformed into commodities, making the inequalities of the city ever more acute. Profit has become more important than social need. The poor are forced to pay more for worse housing. Communities are faced with the violence of displacement and gentrification. And the benefits of decent housing are only available for those who can afford it. In Defense of Housing is the definitive statement on this crisis from leading urban planner Peter Marcuse and sociologist David Madden. They look at the causes and consequences of the housing problem and detail the need for progressive alternatives. The housing crisis cannot be solved by minor policy shifts, they argue. Rather, the housing crisis has deep political and economic roots-and therefore requires a radical response.
What are the consequences of Yugoslavia’s existence – and breakup – for the present? This book reflects on this very question, identifying and analysing the political legacies left behind by Yugoslavia through the prism of continuities and ruptures between the past and present of the area. After the collapse of Yugoslavia, it’s former states adopted a nation-building process which opted to eradicate the past as such an approach seemed more convenient for the new national projects. The new states adopted new institutions, new market-oriented economic paradigms and new national symbols. Yugoslavia existed for 70 years and to consider the current political situation in post-Yugoslav states such as Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Kosovo without taking into account the legacy and remnants of Yugoslavia is to discount a vital part of their political history. This volume takes a multi-disciplinary and multi-faceted approach to examining the legacy of Yugoslavia, covering politics, society, international relations and economics. Focusing on distinctive features of Yugoslavia including worker self-management, the combination of liberalism and communism and the Cold War policy of Non-Alignment, The Legacy of Yugoslavia places Yugoslavia in historical perspective and connects the region's past with its contemporary political situation.
To mark the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens in 2012, Unthank Books are publishing Sir David Madden's masterful new completion of THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD, Dickens' last, and unfinished novel. In a work of incredible literary ventriloquism David Madden renders the greatest homage he can to the great author by creating an ending as faithful to Dickens' written intentions as possible. Closely following the clues clearly laid down by Dickens in his sadly incomplete version, David Madden seamlessly continues the story with a stunningly similar repertoire of comedy, psychological acuity, inimitable description and turn of phrase. Published in one volume with Madden succeeding the 'master, ' this is at last a completion of the mystery which proves it to be as much a 'whydunnit' as a 'whodunnit' and affords real pleasure, finally and fully from start to finish. It is literally as if Dickens has risen from his grave to finish the job
The North Norfolk Railway is a heritage steam railway which has been in operation for over 40 years. The railway is separated from the national railway system by a tantalising 300 yards where it crosses a busy main road. For many years the railway company has had aspirations to link up to the main line by re-opening the level crossing thus allowing tourist and charter trains to reach the heritage railway from all over the UK. It is now going to happen. This book however describes the occasions when the crossing was used and in one particular case after the level crossing had been removed. The efforts shown in this book is a tribute to the many volunteers who made these train movements possible.
When she is seventeen, Emily Merritt’s beloved father gives her the piano she has always wanted. A few days later, having lost his job, he sells Emily’s piano and moves the family out of its two-story house in Cleveland, Ohio, to his mother’s three-room house in his hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee. The loss of her piano casts a shadow over Emily’s life in Knoxville, a city she could never love. Throughout the rest of her life, Emily longs to return to Cleveland, where she had an idyllic youth with many boyfriends and girlfriends and was, above all, a good piano student. Her life becomes like that of a nomad, moving from house to house and from job to job. Her great love of life is expressed by dancing in highway honky-tonks, along with her six beautiful girlfriends. After divorcing her lovable, alcoholic husband, Emily falls deeply in love with troubled married men. She doesn’t enjoy whiskey or smoking, but she’s not a churchgoer. She raises three boys in poverty. A fourth son dies soon after birth. Oldest Dickie becomes a life-long petty conman, but little brother John, known as “Sunshine,” becomes a legendary rescuer of wayward boys and girls. Jerry, the middle brother, becomes a merchant seaman, a soldier, and finally a professor and successful writer. Rather than a chronological narrative, Madden employs an impressionistic style that enables readers to experience Emily’s memories as he imagines them. In sharply focused scenes, Madden evokes the colorful expressions of the articulate, witty woman he has spent all his life listening to—and this memoir will inspire readers to listen eagerly, too.
Best known for his novels, including the National Book Award
winners "The Field of Vision" and "Plains Song," Nebraska-born
author Wright Morris has long been regarded as one of America's
most gifted writers. This volume, culling work from the photo-text
books, criticism, and numerous short stories frequently overlooked
among his oeuvre, reflects the true breadth of this
quintessentially American artist's talents. As such, it offers a
fascinating overview of Morris's inspiring accomplishments in
multiple genres.
What are the consequences of Yugoslavia's existence - and breakup - for the present? This book reflects on this very question, identifying and analysing the political legacies left behind by Yugoslavia through the prism of continuities and ruptures between the past and present of the area. After the collapse of Yugoslavia, it's former states adopted a nation-building process which opted to eradicate the past as such an approach seemed more convenient for the new national projects. The new states adopted new institutions, new market-oriented economic paradigms and new national symbols. Yugoslavia existed for 70 years and to consider the current political situation in post-Yugoslav states such as Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Kosovo without taking into account the legacy and remnants of Yugoslavia is to discount a vital part of their political history. This volume takes a multi-disciplinary and multi-faceted approach to examining the legacy of Yugoslavia, covering politics, society, international relations and economics. Focusing on distinctive features of Yugoslavia including worker self-management, the combination of liberalism and communism and the Cold War policy of Non-Alignment, The Legacy of Yugoslavia places Yugoslavia in historical perspective and connects the region's past with its contemporary political situation.
The Hero and the Witness is a harrowing and comic story of nineteen-year-old Lucius's ordeal as a merchant seaman caught in the crossfire between an enigmatic scapegoat and a violent crew en route to Chile. In To Play the Con, Lucius, now a teacher and a first-time novelist, cons his little brother's six small-town victims into accepting restitution for passing bad checks, a scam their older brother taught him and that may send him to the chain gang. Lucius works another con in Nothing Dies, but Something Mourns by persuading an ancient lady in a mountain town to tell him the romantic story of her brief love affair with Jesse James. In the innovative novella Marble Goddesses and Mortal Flesh, Lucius, now middle-aged and a successful novelist, buys the derelict Bijou Theater where he was a very young usher and becomes immersed to the brink of psychosis in memories of the immortal movie goddesses of the 40s and the mortal girls of his youth. The novella is the perfect medium for this wide-ranging author to explore the power of the imagination and of oral storytelling in the lives of his characters. Madden's unmatched scope in this collection could draw comparisons to Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Thomas Wolfe, and James M. Cain equally well.
"London Bridge in Plague and Fire is a brilliant cleaving of historical fact and Blakeian imagination. David Madden has written his masterpiece." -Ron Rash, author of Serena "David Madden's London Bridge is a the spellbinding story of the life and times of a world icon. Distinguish yourself and buy it now!"-Winston Groom, author of Forrest Gump "In London Bridge in Plague and Fire David Madden creates his own fictive historical tapestry, bringing to life the complex medieval world of Old England. But Madden filters his vision through the voice and eyes of a seventeenth-century poet-chronicler. The result is a deep, rich narrative of a particular place across the centuries, unfolding and rewarding the reader with the true romance of history."-Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek and Lions of the West "One of the many colorful characters in David Madden's wild but accurate chronicle-novel says, `The Bridge is, after all, a thought turned to stone.' By dint of forcible imagination, careful research, and devotion to his subject, the author has retransformed the stone to passionate thought. London Bridge in Plague and Fire is a strong book faithful to a great tradition." -Fred Chappell, author of Dagon and Midquest
Though he has authored more than eleven novels including,
"Cassandra Singing, The Suicide's
"Like Dr. Frankenstein's invented creature, the larger-than-life,
flesh-and-blood characters of London Bridge in Plague and Fireare
made from pieces of the dead past that are forged in the
consciousness of an historian--himself a creation of history and of
David Madden's literary magic. Struck by the lightning bolt of the
co-joined imaginations of Madden and his reader, the fabricated
beings rise up and walk on London Bridge, and they have the
audacity to speak for themselves in completely convincing and
haunting voices." --Allen Wier, author of Tehano
"Abducted by Circumstance is a thrilling crime story, a dark and
complex psychological study, a rich contemplation on contemporary
life. It is also a masterful moral drama about the centuries-old
conflicts that arise from the juxtaposition of the flesh and
spirit." In Abducted by Circumstance, David Madden offers his readers a
unique experience simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating.
David Madden is one of the South's most notable contemporary writers. His interests are remarkably vast. He has published award-winning fiction, poetry, plays, critical works, and essays on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from history to popular culture. This collection represents Madden's essays on various other southern writers and his own struggle to come to terms with how the works and lives of these writers have influenced his own life and work. By analyzing the charged image of the spider web, as described in chapter four of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, Madden shows that it is a central symbol for his involvement with the interconnected, complex tradition of contemporary southern literature. Touching the Web of Southern Novelists brings together essays on Faulkner, Warren, McCullers, Wolfe, Agee, and a new essay on Evelyn Scott. More than a collection of criticism, the book explores, in overlapping, far-reaching ways, how influence works its way through the southern literary tradition. It also includes an unusually detailed index. Two of the common elements in the essays are the dynamics and consequences of the relationship of an ostensible hero to his or her witnesses and the art of fiction, especially in the technique of using a charged image--a term that Madden invented. Another element is the overwhelming, if sometimes hidden, effect of the Civil War upon southern fiction. Madden provocatively argues that no northerner can write a "true" Civil War novel. All Southern fiction comes out of the Civil War, he argues, and that Absalom, Absalom! is the best Civil War novel because of its complex implications--not because it is overtly about the war. Perhaps mostpowerful because of its semi-autobiographical nature, Touching the Web of Southern Novelists will appeal to anyone with an interest in literary studies and how art and life in southern novels are entwined with each other--caught in a web.
Originally published in 1892, "Loss of the Sultana and Reminiscences of Survivors is a collection of first-hand accounts by those who lived to tell the story of perhaps the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history. One the Mississippi River just above Memphis at two o'clock on the morning of April 27, 1865, the steamboat "Sultana, carrying over 2,400 passengers (it was licensed to carry only 356), exploded and sank. Over 1,700 people perished. Most of the passengers were Union soldiers recently released from Confederate prisons. Many were from East Tennessee. They had boarded at Vicksburg, where the longest siege of the war had finally ended in Confederate surrender, ending the Vicksburg campaign. The soldiers, homeward bound from Andersonville and Cahaba Confederate prisons. Many were from East Tennessee. They had boarded at Vicksburg, where the longest siege of the war had finally ended in Confederate surrender, ending the Vicksburg campaign. The soldiers, homeward bound from Andersonville and Cahaba Confederate prisons, had survived the terrors of battle, the loss of close comrades, physical and psychological wounds, the risky confinement of hospital, the humiliation of capture and surrender, escape and recapture, homesickness, boredom, the daily threat of death by starvation, disease, suicide, robbery, injury, or death by raiders. Chester D. Berry--one of the survivors--compiled facts, records, and personal accounts of other survivors, resulting in this compelling and profound testimony to the human spirit in the face of tragedy.
"Madden has a lyric, a magical tone . . . and he is at his best
with dialogue. The words in this novel are very nearly musical. . .
. Eastern Kentucky is perhaps not all beautiful, but it is
beautifully felt in this novel."--Joyce Carol Oates, The Southern
Review
A gripping and thought-provoking work that is unlike any Civil War novel previously written, Sharpshooter takes us into the mind of one of the war's veterans as he attempts, years after the conflict, to reconstruct his experiences and to find some measure of meaning in them. A child of the divided East Tennessee mountain region, Willis Carr left home at age thirteen to follow his father and brothers on a bridge-burning mission for the Union cause. Imprisoned at Knoxville, he agreed to join the Confederate army to avoid being hanged and became a sharpshooter serving under General Longstreet. He survived several major battles, including Gettysburg, and eventually found himself guarding prisoners at the infamous Andersonville stockade, where a former slave taught him to read. After the war, haunted by his memories, Carr writes down his story, revisits the battlefields, studies photographs and drawings, listens to other veterans as they tell their stories, and pores over memoirs and other books. Above all, he embues whatever he hears, sees, and reads with his emotions, his imagination, and his intellect. Yet, even as an old man nearing death, he still feels that he has somehow missed the war, that something essential about it has eluded him. Finally, in a searing moment of personal revelation, a particular memory, long suppressed, rises to the surface of Carr's consciousness and draws his long quest to a poignant close. A compelling work of fiction from a writer who is both a gifted novelist and a distinguished student of the Civil War, David Madden's Sharpshooter invites us to see this signal episode in American history in a new way--to grasp its facts, to imagine what facts cannot convey, and to make the war our own.
The purpose of this collection of sixteen essays on William Faulkner's multi-faceted novel is to provide the reader who has read or is about to read Absalom, Absalom! with as much of a multi-faceted perspective as possible. Faulkner created a novel so complex that every interpretation of his "little postage stamp of native soil" is as valid as a single postage stamp in a postal system. Each essay is limited by its premise, but that very limitation enables the critic to focus the reader's attention upon an aspect of this multifaceted novel. The value of each of these pieces is not only what it reveals but what it does not reveal, enabling the reader to participate in the critical process by questioning, disagreeing, conjuring his or her own insights along the way. The opening six original essays offer basic, clearly stated perspectives: a brief view of Faulkner's life and works; and two close readings of Absalom, Absalom! that apply specific critical methods. The novel in a cultural-historical context is also discussed, as is the novel's critical reception. Many more narrowly-focused essays discuss the novel from a feminist standpoint, its relationship to The Great Gatsby and All the King's Men. The narrative perspective and the storytelling themes that pervade the novel are discussed at length as is the interwoven web of facts that enriches Absalom, Absalom! with countless dimensions. Tensions between the old south and the modern era are explored. Faulkner's structure and prose style are meticulously investigated. In sum, this reference provides a remarkably rich, deeply varied number of perspectives on a novel that continues to offer new insight into its complex design and execution. Each essay is 5,000 words in length, and all essays conclude with a list of "Works Cited," along with endnotes. Finally, the volume's appendixes offer a section of useful reference resources: |
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