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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.
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Perfectly Black (Paperback)
Gabrielle Madden; Foreword by Anthony Stringer; David Madden
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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.
While embracing the prose for which Morris is justly famous, this
treasury of work also highlights his photography and other literary
genres, including hard-to-find stories first published in
magazines, some of which were early drafts of future novels.
Edited by Morris's long-time friend David Madden, this
one-of-a-kind collection captures a man of multifarious genius.
Replete with interviews, photography, a biographical sketch,
suggestions for further reading, and Morris's inimitable writing,
this compendium is an indispensable resource for those who wish to
understand and appreciate the brilliance and virtuosity of one of
America's true talents.
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
Wife, Abducted by Circumstance," and the recent "London Bridge in
Plague and Fire," David
Madden has been publishing short stories for all six decades of
his active career. "The Last
Bizarre Tale" consists of works that appeared in journals but that
have not appeared together
as a collection.
Madden used two stories, "The Singer" and "Second Look Presents:
the Rape of an
Indian Brave," as chapters in his 1980 novel "On the Big Wind."
"The Headless Girl's Mother"
was first published as a chapter in a serialized novel entitled
"Hair of the Dog." Two other stories
developed out of longer versions of Madden's novels. "A Demon in
My View" is part of
a sequel, not yet published, to "Bijou."
All of the stories in David Madden's third collection are
distinguished by variety of content
and by shifting styles and often innovative techniques. They are
to varying degrees and
in various ways bizarre in their characters and their
relationships, in the kinds of internal
and external conflicts, and in locales and themes. The title
story, "The Last Bizarre Tale," involving
a corpse that has hung on a hook in a funeral home garage for
decades, is evocative
of Poe and, in its dark, grotesque humor, Flannery O'Connor and
Carson McCullers.
"Process is as important as product to David Madden," writes
editor James Perkins,
"and one can learn as much about the process of writing as about
the human condition by a
careful reading of these stories."
"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
For more than two thousand years, Old London Bridge evolved through
many fragile wooden forms until it became the first bridge built of
stone since the Roman invaders. With over two hundred houses and
shops built directly upon the bridge, it was a wonder of the world
until it was dismantled in 1832.
In this stunningly original novel, Old London Bridge is as much a
living, breathing character as its architect, the priest Peter de
Colechurch, who began work on it in 1176, partly to honor
Archbishop Thomas a Becket, murdered in Canterbury Cathedral. In
1665, the year of the Great Plague, Peter's history is unknown, but
Daryl Braintree, a young poet living on the bridge, resurrects him
through inspired flights of imagination. As Daryl chronicles the
history of the bridge and composes poems about it, he reads his
work to his witty mistress, who prefers making love.
Among other key characters is Lucien Redd, who as a boy was
sexually brutalized by both Puritans and Cavaliers during the
English Civil War before being kidnapped off London Bridge onto a
merchant ship. Thus traumatized, he aspires to become Lucifer's
most evil disciple. Twenty years later, young Morgan Wood is forced
into seafaring service to pay off his father's debts; and,
compelled by obsessive nostalgia for his early life on the bridge,
he keeps a journal. Joining Morgan aboard ship, Lucien "befriends"
him--to devastating effect.
The shops and houses on the bridge survive both the Great Plague
and Great Fire, believed to be God's wrath upon sinful London.
Fearing that God may next destroy the bridge and its eight hundred
denizens, seven of its merchant leaders revert to a pagan
appeasement ritual by selecting one of their virgin daughters for
sacrifice. To enact their plan, they hire Lucien, who has returned
to the bridge to burn it out of pure meanness. But as Lucien
discovers, the chosen victim may be more Lucifer's favorite than he
is.
Like his creation Daryl Braintree, David Madden employs diverse
innovative ways to tell this complex, often shocking, but also
lyrical story. The author of ten novels--including The Suicide's
Wife, Bijou, and most recently, Abducted by Circumstance and
Sharpshooter--Madden has, with London Bridge in Plague and Fire,
given us the most ambitious and imaginative work of his
distinguished career.
"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."
--Allen Wier, author of Tehano
"David Madden continues to push the envelope of literary fiction
in subtle and profoundly sophisticated ways. Abducted by
Circumstance is a quirky, utterly compelling novel in pieces that
in its very structure speaks to the work's twenty-first-century
theme: how do we find connection in a fragmented world? In this new
book Madden is at the height of his considerable power."
--Robert Olen Butler
In Abducted by Circumstance, David Madden offers his readers a
unique experience simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating.
Carol Seaborg makes a risky visit in zero weather to a lighthouse
near her house in The Thousand Islands of New York on the Canadian
border. A self-confident, attractive woman of about 55 suddenly
appears on the observation deck looking out over frozen Lake
Ontario. Carol admires the woman as her ideal.
Suddenly, the woman disappears, apparently abducted by a serial
rapist and killer, stimulating in Carol an immediate empathy that,
enhanced by the power of her imagination, is so great as to make
her unique. Carol projects her own emotions, imagination, and
intellect into Glenda's experience.
To render that empathy and imagination, Madden channels everything
that the people around her say and do through Carol's perceptions
so intimately that he shifts frequently and without transition into
her thoughts, which focus mostly on the abducted woman, whose name
newscasters reveal is Glenda Hamilton.
As Carol imagines Glenda gradually coping with her abductor, she
speaks directly, sometimes out loud, to her, encouraging her,
advising her, expressing fear for her.
If Carol's external experiences are passive almost to paralysis,
her memories reveal that her life has been full of more venturesome
relationships and events (she once rode across Greece alone on a
bicycle) than most wives and mothers in their late thirties have.
Carol's emotions and imagination are highly charged and exquisitely
presented.
The circumstances and relationships of her past and present
predispose Carol to empathize with Glenda. Carol's own life among a
crude, remote second husband, a somewhat estranged adolescent son,
a bright five-year-old daughter, a father who is a rather cold
philosophy teacher, and the strong spiritual presence of her mother
who committed suicide, is simple and routine. The events involving
Glenda's disappearance take place during the week before Carol's
second surgery for breast cancer.
Gradually, as she takes late night drives with her little girl,
visits her ex-boyfriend's father in a nursing home, drives by her
ex-lover's house and business, and visits the campus where her
father is a prominent teacher, the reader realizes, some pages
before Carol herself does, that she has been abducted by the
circumstances of her life.
Although it is grounded in the realistic detail of everyday life,
Abducted by Circumstance is unique in conception, style, and
characterization. Madden immerses the reader in an extraordinarily
rich and unforgettable psychological experience.
Thoroughly absorbing from start to finish, Abducted by
Circumstance explores Carol's troubled psyche with the rare
precision and insight that have long distinguished David Madden's
fiction.
Since 1961, each of David Madden's highly praised novels and two
books of short stories has had some quality of uniqueness, among
them Cassandra Singing, Sharpshooter: A Novel of the Civil War,
Bijou, and The Suicide's Wife. Twice nominated for the Pulitzer
Prize, David Madden received the Robert Penn Warren Award from the
Fellowship of Southern Writers.
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
"Cassandra Singing successfully combines crude animal vigor with
intellectual force. Maintaining a sure, steady hold on its subject,
it takes us into a strange world and brings that world to
life."--Peter Wolfe, New York Times Book Review
Set in the exotic coal country of eastern Kentucky's mountains,
Cassandra Singing centers on a brother and a sister and their
contrasting ways of coping with life. Lone McDaniel is drawn to a
life of action, riding a motorcycle with his friend Boyd Weaver,
the wildest and most dangerous boy in town. Cassie McDaniel,
bedridden for most of her life with rheumatic fever, lives in the
world of her own imagination, feeding vicariously on her brother's
stories of his adventures with Boyd and Boyd's girlfriend, Gypsy.
Cassie's strange imaginings and the folk songs she sings are her
efforts to communicate with Lone, and they affect him in two ways:
They pull him unwillingly into the tangled emotional terrain of his
family, and they fuel his urge to escape from the nearly incestuous
relationship he has with Cassie. When a willful act of destruction
lands Lone in jail, Cassie decides to go out into the world, where
she finds herself drawn gradually to Boyd. Both are isolated from
others--Cassie by her vision of life, Boyd by his hostile
actions--but they have one thing in common: their strange love of
Lone. Cassie's attempts to become Lone hurl this searing novel
toward its dramatic climax.
The Author: David Madden is creator and Director the U.S. Civil War
Center at Louisiana State University. Cassandra Singing, his second
novel, was originally published in 1969. His other highly praised
novels and short story collections include The Suicide's Wife,
Bijou, The New Orleans of Possibilities, On the Big Wind, The
Shadow Knows, and Sharpshooter (Tennessee, 1996). He is a native of
Knoxville, Tennessee.
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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