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I read the poems of What She Said About Love with a growing sense
of their achievement, their expression of a particular and valuable
voice. Here is a poet who understands that "The act of casting
shape from chaos / breeds enemies." That refers to Michaelangelo,
but it stands in for the poet generally, and especially one of who
has Tony Magistrale's gifts. Poetry is the enemy of bland, boring,
mass-produced speech. It is language intensified to a level of
combat with the world. And Magistrale has managed to keep up the
fight in poem after poem. This is a bracing, sweet, dark, and
always moving volume of poems. I believe it will affect those who
read it deeply. It deserves a wide audience. - Jay Parini,
Middlebury College "The Plan," which describes a Texas-style
barbecue in a Venetian twilight, concludes: "In this most secreted
city, I divulge no secrets / Content to wear my hat at rakish angle
/ Tend the grill, savor its sizzle," a characterization that neatly
fits the many fine poems of Anthony Magistrale whose sizzle is sure
to whet the appetites of readers. The tones may vary, from the
moodiness of "Venetian Poems" to the playfulness of "Beware, the
Bible Warns, of Fallen Women," but constant throughout are the
intellectual alertness, the satisfying structures, and the vivid
descriptions: the adjectives are often surprising, as in "dense,
pasty Milanese rain," but almost always just right. "I Nemici" be
gins: "The act of casting shape from chaos / breeds enemies."
Magistrale's point is well taken here, but in this case it's much
more likely to breed friends and admirers. - Michael Palma,
Bordighera Poetry Prize Judge, 2007-2008
In Violence in the Films of Stephen King, contributors analyze the
theme of violence in the film adaptations of Stephen King's
work-ranging from the earliest films in the King canon to his most
recent iterations-through a variety of lenses. Investigating the
diverse and varying roles that violence continues to play as both
the level of violence and the gendered depictions of violence have
evolved, many of the contributors come to the conclusion that
King's films have grown more violent over time. This book also
examines the fine line between necessary violence and
sensationalist violence, discussing the complexity of determining
what constitutes violence with a narrative and ethical significance
versus violence intended solely to titillate, repulse, or otherwise
draw an emotional reaction from viewers. Scholars of film studies,
horror studies, literary studies, and gender studies will find this
book particularly useful.
This book surveys the labyrinthine relationship between Stephen
King and American History. By depicting American History as a
doomed cycle of greed and violence, King poses a number of
important questions: who gets to make history, what gets left out,
how one understands one's role within it, and how one might avoid
repeating mistakes of the past. This volume examines King's
relationship to American History through the illumination of
metanarratives, adaptations, "queer" and alternative historical
lenses, which confront the destructive patterns of our past as well
as our capacity to imagine a different future. Stephen King and
American History will present readers with an opportunity to place
popular culture in conversation with the pressing issues of our
day. If we hope to imagine a different path forward, we will need
to come to terms with this enclosure-a task for which King's corpus
is uniquely well-suited.
This book surveys the labyrinthine relationship between Stephen
King and American History. By depicting American History as a
doomed cycle of greed and violence, King poses a number of
important questions: who gets to make history, what gets left out,
how one understands one's role within it, and how one might avoid
repeating mistakes of the past. This volume examines King's
relationship to American History through the illumination of
metanarratives, adaptations, "queer" and alternative historical
lenses, which confront the destructive patterns of our past as well
as our capacity to imagine a different future. Stephen King and
American History will present readers with an opportunity to place
popular culture in conversation with the pressing issues of our
day. If we hope to imagine a different path forward, we will need
to come to terms with this enclosure-a task for which King's corpus
is uniquely well-suited.
The contributions of Edgar Allan Poe have withstood the test of
time; his best poems and fiction are more popular and carry greater
significance now than they did during his own era. This highly
readable introduction to the life, times, and major works of Poe
offers fresh interpretations of timeless masterpieces like The
Raven and The Purloined Letter. Carefully considering important
thematic elements as well as genre, this book organizes the works
of Poe into four significant groupings: the poetry, Vampiric love
stories, tales of psychological terror, and the detective stories.
Close readings are given for a selection of the most important
works that represent Poe's canon of writings, including the
chilling Tell Tale Heart and The Black Cat.
This introductory study to Edgar Allan Poe begins with a concise
biographical chapter that explores Poe's troubled experiences. The
Literary Heritage chapter chronicles Poe's influence on other
writers, artists, and filmmakers who followed. This work examines
the major poems from Poe's canon, with special attention to those
works that are most often taught and anthologized. Poe's most
famous tales of terror and revenge are juxtaposed because they all
revolve around murders and the elements of terror associated with
the act of killing. Likewise, his love stories are brought together
in a chapter that deals with vampirisim and gender. The final
chapter, The Origins of the Detective Tale, examines Poe's tales of
ratiocination, and traces the evolution of many popular culture
super sleuths to Poe's Dupin. A selective bibliography of
biographical and critical works on Poe, including contemporary
reviews, completes this thorough volume. Students, general readers,
and fans of all things Gothic will enjoy the fascinating insights
this volume offers.
This book is about culture shock and the writing process. For a
student, the relationship between writing and the challenge of
living in a foreign culture may not be obvious. The purpose of
Writing Across Culture is to aid the student in documenting and
analyzing the connection. If culture can be broadly defined as the
unwritten rules of every-day life, one effective method for
learning these rules is to write about them as they are discovered.
In this way, it is possible to see writing as a tool for cultural
inquiry and comprehension, and, hence, an antidote for culture
shock. Writing Across Culture encourages its readers to become
writers engaged in a dialogue-between the individual and the new
society-about everyday cultural differences.
Surely one of America's most popular novelists, Stephen King has
only recently begun to receive serious attention from scholars and
literary critics. The Dark Descent assembles fifteen illuminating
original essays that consider King from a variety of intellectual
orientations, addressing the major novels and central thematic
concerns that represent King's contributions to American letters
and elevating King scholarship to a new level of critical
discourse. This volume places King firmly within the canon of
contemporary American fiction. The essayists are concerned with
explicating the meanings of individual narratives and creating
critical contexts for their interpretion. While covering a broad
range of his works and using multiple theoretical
approaches--including reader-response, mythic, psychoanalytic, and
structuralist criticism--to offer insights into King's fiction,
most of the essayists reflect on one of two central theses: that
King's body of literature may be seen as having been deeply
influenced by the mainstream traditions of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century American and European fictions, and that the
narratives may be read as profound commentary on the major
political and social tensions shaping contemporary American life.
King's supernatural horrors reflect actual horrors, and his
compelling style makes art out of horror fiction. A King
chronology, bibliography and an expository introduction flank the
analytical essays.
?? [[ Best known as the author of imaginative short fiction, such
as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Cask of Amontillado, and
as the author of hauntingly sonorous poems such as The Raven, Edgar
Allan Poe was a leading practitioner of the American Gothic and
helped popularize the short story as a genre. This reference work
assembles in dictionary format a complete and current body of
information on Poe's life and work. More than 1900 entries cover
all phases of Poe's art and literary criticism, his family
relationships, his numerous travels and residences, and the
abundance of critical responses to his works. Each entry provides
bibliographical information, and the volume concludes with an
extensive listing of works for further consideration. ]] ?? Best
known for his mysterious and imaginative short fiction, such as The
Fall of the House of Usher and The Cask of Amontillado, as well as
hauntingly sonorous poems such as The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe has
secured a lasting place in the American literary canon. He was one
of the first American authors to be given serious attention in
Europe, and his works popularized the Gothic, the short story, and
detective fiction in America. Poe's works are frequently studied in
schools and colleges, but he also retains his appeal as one of
America's most demanding popular authors. His works reflect his
vast and sometimes arcane erudition, his probing insights into the
workings of the mind, his theories of literature and aesthetics,
and his interest in science and the supernatural. Through more than
1900 alphabetically arranged entries, this reference book provides
complete and current coverage of Poe's life and work. Some entries
treat Poe's known reading and his responses to literary
contemporaries and international literary figures. Others comment
on the impact of various writers and literary traditions on Poe's
imagination. Still others address Poe's views on subjects ranging
from Shakespeare to mesmerism to phrenology. Each entry is
supplemented by a bibliographical note which gives the basis for
the entry and suggests sources for further investigation. Each
entry for Poe's fiction and poetry contains a critical synopsis,
and an extensive bibliography at the end of the volume lists the
most important critical and biographical studies of Poe.
This analysis of the work of Stephen King explores the distinctly
American fears and foibles that King has celebrated, condemned, and
generally examined in the course of his wildly successful career.
Stephen King: America's Storyteller explores the particular
American-ness of Stephen King's work. It is the first major
examination to follow this defining theme through King's 40-year
career, from his earliest writings to his most recent novels and
films made from them. Stephen King begins by tracing Stephen King's
rise from his formative years to his status as a one of the most
popular writers in publishing history. It then takes a close look
at the major works from his canon, including The Shining, The
Stand, It, Dolores Claiborne, and The Dark Tower. In these works
and others, author Tony Magistrale focuses on King's deep rooted
sense of the American experience, exemplified by his clear-eyed
presentation of our historical and cultural foibles and scars; his
gallery of unlikely friendships that cross race, age, and class
boundaries; and his transcendent portrayals of uniquely American
survival instincts, fellowship, and acts of heroism from the least
likely of sources. Presents separate chapters on major works of
Stephen King, including The Shining, The Stand, It, Dolores
Claiborne, and The Dark Tower Includes a chronology of Stephen
King's life and 40-year career Offers a concluding interview with
Stephen King
This book features an in-depth analysis of the world's most popular
movie, The Shawshank Redemption, delving into issues such as: the
significance of race in the film, its cinematic debt to earlier
genres, the gothic influences at work in the movie, and the
representation of Andy's poster art as cross-gendered signifiers.
In addition to exploring the film and novella from which it was
adapted, this book also traces the history of the Ohio State
Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio, which served as the film's central
location, and its relationship to the movie's fictional Shawshank
Prison. The last chapter examines why this film has remained both a
popular and critical success, inspiring diverse fan bases on the
Internet and the evolution of the Shawshank Trail, fourteen of the
film's actual site locations that have become a major tourist
attraction in central Ohio.
ENTANGLEMENTS is Tony Magistrale's third collection of poetry. The
book contains poetry written in both Europe and the United States.
Many of the poems reflect a certain awareness of Vermont as
seasonal place and essence. Additionally, some of the poems bear
black and white illustrations created by Michael Strauss,
well-known Vermont landscape painter.
I read the poems of What She Said About Love with a growing sense
of their achievement, their expression of a particular and valuable
voice. Here is a poet who understands that "The act of casting
shape from chaos / breeds enemies." That refers to Michaelangelo,
but it stands in for the poet generally, and especially one of who
has Tony Magistrale's gifts. Poetry is the enemy of bland, boring,
mass-produced speech. It is language intensified to a level of
combat with the world. And Magistrale has managed to keep up the
fight in poem after poem. This is a bracing, sweet, dark, and
always moving volume of poems. I believe it will affect those who
read it deeply. It deserves a wide audience. - Jay Parini,
Middlebury College "The Plan," which describes a Texas-style
barbecue in a Venetian twilight, concludes: "In this most secreted
city, I divulge no secrets / Content to wear my hat at rakish angle
/ Tend the grill, savor its sizzle," a characterization that neatly
fits the many fine poems of Anthony Magistrale whose sizzle is sure
to whet the appetites of readers. The tones may vary, from the
moodiness of "Venetian Poems" to the playfulness of "Beware, the
Bible Warns, of Fallen Women," but constant throughout are the
intellectual alertness, the satisfying structures, and the vivid
descriptions: the adjectives are often surprising, as in "dense,
pasty Milanese rain," but almost always just right. "I Nemici" be
gins: "The act of casting shape from chaos / breeds enemies."
Magistrale's point is well taken here, but in this case it's much
more likely to breed friends and admirers. - Michael Palma,
Bordighera Poetry Prize Judge, 2007-2008
Magistrale discusses the themes that turn King's fiction into
morality tales.
A survey of criticism on King's book and Kubrick's film adaptation
"The Shining."
One of the very first books to take Stephen King seriously,
"Landscape of Fear" (originally published in 1988) reveals the
source of King's horror in the sociopolitical anxieties of the
post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era. In this groundbreaking study,
Tony Magistrale shows how King's fiction transcends the escapism
typical of its genre to tap into our deepest cultural fears: "that
the government we have installed through the democratic process is
not only corrupt but actively pursuing our destruction, that our
technologies have progressed to the point at which the individual
has now become expendable, and that our fundamental social
institutions-school, marriage, workplace, and the church-have,
beneath their veneers of respectability, evolved into perverse
manifestations of narcissism, greed, and violence."
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