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The nature, history, and transformation of the American sentence in twentieth-century American fiction is the focus of this article, which examines the shift from the oracular to ordinary style, the contrast between James and Hemingway, or Thomas Wolfe and Cormac McCarthy. Examples of twentieth-century writers include Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, J.D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, and Jennifer Eagan. Overlooked, the sentence remains the core of literary expression, but it is a problematic form associated with such cultural changes as the telegraph, World War II, and crime writing, as much as the literary imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers criticism on the 1962 novel "The Man in the High Castle," by Philip K. Dick. A World War II-themed alternate-history novel, the book has been popular since its publication. The article explores the work as a Cold War commentary and in addition looks at how it examines the suspension of time.

The article focuses on Thomas Pynchon's "Introduction" to "Slow Learner," arguing for the sincerity of Pynchon's writing advice rather than dismissing it as sardonic. Topics include Pynchon's self-criticism, his advice on writing about ignorance, and his caution against overreliance on abstract themes. It also examines Pynchon's reflections on narrative structure and the pitfalls of stylistic preciosity in writing.

The article is devoted to the study of the short story genre in the context of the second half of the twentieth century American literature, an attempt is made to show the way of the genre from the form of standard story to so called "psychological sketch". The short story manifested the national originality of American prose, the peculiarities of the national character and local color earlier and more fully than other forms. It developed the traditions of folk stories, folk humor, and satire. The object of analysis is J. Updike's short story "Pigeon Feathers", that is concentrated on the middle class problems of American society and the "ordinary Americans". Updike became an innovator in the short story genre, embodying the best ideas of his predecessors and developing his own ideas of genre diversity. According to both national and American critics, the main stylistic feature of Updike's short story collections is the close connection between them, most of them continuing each other, leaving behind a through plot and a single emotional experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Neeli Cherkovski's multifaceted career as a poet, activist, and biographer, highlighting his contributions to literature and his reflections on life in San Francisco. Topics include Cherkovski's literary influences, childhood experiences, and the evolution of his poetry over six decades, emphasizing his enduring commitment to the art form despite challenges and changes in the world around him.

The article focuses on the unexpected embrace of poet Jack Kerouac and his work by a group of nostalgic young neo-conservatives who were fans of William F. Buckley. Topics include the relationship between Kerouac and Buckley, their shared Catholic and conservative backgrounds, and the nuanced understanding of Kerouac's worldview by conservative writers, highlighting his patriotism and religious influences.

The article focuses on the intertwining lives of Gerd Stern and William Buck, exploring their involvement in San Francisco's avant-garde scene and their collaboration with composer Harry Partch. Topics include Buck's journey from an Army soldier to a member of the Beat counterculture, his relationship with Stern and Jane, and his ambitious project of translating Hindu epics into more accessible forms for American readers.

The article focuses on Jack Micheline, portraying him as a bohemian poet whose life is inseparable from his art, reflecting on his unconventional lifestyle and his profound impact on those around him. Topics include Micheline's passionate and often controversial views on society, his prolific yet largely unpublished literary output, and the complex evaluation of his poetic genius and limitations.

An interview with Bill Morgan, an acclaimed writer, editor, bibliographer, and archival consultant, is presented. Topics include Morgan's transition from a library school assignment on Lawrence Ferlinghetti to becoming deeply immersed in Beat culture, the monumental task of organizing Ginsberg's vast collection of materials, and the methodical approach Morgan took to manage the overwhelming volume of archival material.

The article focuses on Allen Ginsberg's use of pastoral themes in his poetry, exploring how he engages with nature and the environment to comment on 20th-century America's ecological challenges. It discusses the juxtaposition of urban landscapes and natural settings in Ginsberg's works, highlighting his critique of modern civilization's impact on the environment and his imaginative redemption of nature.

The article focuses on the ecological awareness within the Beat Generation, highlighting influences from Eastern religions, indigenous cultures, societal criticism, and capitalism. It explores how figures like Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Jack Kerouac were inspired by Buddhism, Native American traditions, and a critique of Western society, leading to a holistic ecological consciousness reflected in their works.

The article critiques the 1949 book "Annie Allen," by African American author Gwendolyn Brooks. Topics discussed include the way the book depicted the life journey of an African American girl in Chicago, Illinois from youth to adulthood, the reconfiguration of the normative values of literary tradition by Brooks which has been evident in the epic poem "The Anniad," featured in the book, and the allusion offered by Brooks to Virgil's epic poem "Aeneid."

This essay addresses the surprising fact that Charles Brockden Brown wrote poetry, and it considers some of the difficulties readers may encounter with his poems, as a way to encourage EAL 's readership to engage this work seriously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines scholarly inquiry into works by American poets from the 1950s to the present. Topics discussed include the interpretive potentials of unusual ways of reading for literary criticism as discussed by Craig Dworkin in "Radium of the Word: A Poetics of Materiality," and the consequences of a spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences for contemporary criticism as explored in the anthology "Geopoetics in Practice," edited by Eric Magrane.

The article examines scholarly inquiry into works by American poets from 1900 to the 1950s. Topics discussed include the inclusion of works by lesser-known poets in the volume "African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song," edited by Kevin Young and issued by the Library of America, and Ben Glaser's exploration of the resistance of New Critical writers to meter and paraphrase in his book "Modernism's Metronome: Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetic."

The article examines scholarly inquiry into literary fiction in the U.S. from the 1980s to the present. It explores the shift in scholarly interest in noncanonical genres, like science fiction and young adult. Topics discussed include the focus of criticism on neoliberalism and the impact of capitalism on the quality of life, and Nancy J. Peterson's exploration of the commercial and critical popularity of the figures of the Native American Renaissance.

The article examines scholarly inquiry into literary fiction in the U.S. from the 1960s to the 1980s. Topics discussed include Douglas Mao's study on the relationship between labor and utopian political theory in the works of authors Ursula K. Le Guin and Samuel R. Delany, scholarly interest in the figure of the child in the early 2000s, and James B. Haile's exploration of the hypervisibility and invisibility of Black maleness in fiction.

The article examines scholarly inquiry into literary fiction in the U.S. from the 1930s to the 1960s. Topics discussed include Jada Ach's study of author John Steinbeck's use of animals in his novel "The Grapes of Wrath," Claire E. Lenviel's exploration of author Richard Wright's protest fiction "Uncle Tom's Children," and Jiang Yunqin's psychoanalytic approach to author Robert Penn Warren's novel "All the King's Men."

The article examines scholarly inquiry into literary fiction in the U.S. from 1900 to the 1930s. Topics discussed include Lisa Siraganian's study on the legal concept of corporate personality and its application to the study of works by authors Frank Norris and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cara L. Lewis' examination of the sculptural aesthetics of author Henry James in "The Golden Bowl" and David A. Rennie's analysis of authorship and publishing during World War I by authors, like Ernest Hemingway.

The article explores the work of the American novelist Ralph Ellison, noting how flight and transgenerational conflict present in his short fiction. Particular focus is given to Ellison's "Mister Toussan," where adolescent friends Buster and Riley lament upon their own subjugated position. Other topics discussed include American systems of racial inequality, the Haitian Revolution, and Black families and their efforts to reconcile the history of racism inherited from slavery and Jim Crow policy.

"The 'Nature' of American Literature" explores how John Crowe Ransom and his less-studied contemporary Elizabeth Madox Roberts advanced a theory of literary objects that emerged from nature itself. This theory formed the basis of Ransom's bid, in "Criticism, Inc." for disciplinary stratification and productivity. Through a set of representational practices this article gathers under the terms "natural reading" and "natural writing," Roberts and Ransom framed valuable aesthetic objects as the product of a carefully cultivated relationship between human observers and landscape. For both, however, this rarified relationship was grounded in and served to reinforce racial hierarchy. Even as the discipline turns away from the cultural elitism associated with New Criticism, Ransom's understanding of the literary object as natural and thus subject to disciplinary study continues to inform contemporary critical practice. This article thus invites engagement with the often submerged racial politics of the ways we constitute objects and processes of disciplinary literary studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the mid-1990s, appeals to "Madre Tierra" [Mother Earth] have united activists and campesino [peasant] networks globally as part of political claims of food sovereignty and agrarian rights. Positioning this paper as a contribution to feminist theory, here I explore what Madre Tierra does in political-aesthetic terms, specifically within situated struggles in Central America. Seen from (white) eco-feminist perspectives, the rise of Madre Tierra could be seen to perform new kinds of exclusions: in this resonant figure diverse indigenous cosmologies seem to collapse; agrarian struggles are rendered "feminine," and both women and land-workers are placed in the realm of nature—which is to say, far from meaning-making. However, when the everyday practices of agrarian activism are thought through Latinx and Chicanx theories of queer kinship and black womanism, a more radical, and specifically decolonial, vision emerges. Through ethnographic vignettes I illustrate the ways that masculinity/femininity, nature/culture, and the relationships between them are being reworked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors discuss trends in literary criticism and publishing in the U.S. since 1945. They mention the focus of criticism through the philosophies of neoliberalism and mediation, the role of literary aesthetics, and present a history of the various stages of the publishing industry in the U.S. as well as an introduction to the articles in the issue.

While W.E.B. Du Bois's first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), is set squarely in the USA, his second work of fiction, Dark Princess: A Romance (1928), abandons this national framework, depicting the treatment of African Americans in the USA as embedded into an international system of economic exploitation based on racial categories. Ultimately, the political visions offered in the novels differ starkly, but both employ a Western literary canon – so-called 'classics' from Greek, German, English, French, and US American literature. With this, Du Bois attempts to create a new space for African Americans in the world (literature) of the 20th century. Weary of the traditions of this 'world literature', the novels complicate and begin to decenter the canon that they draw on. This reading traces what I interpret as subtle signs of frustration over the limits set by the literature that underlies Dark Princess, while its predecessor had been more optimistic in its appropriation of Eurocentric fiction for its propagandist aims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article discusses scholarly publications about American poetry from the 1950s to the present. These include Lauri Ramey's "A History of African American Poetry," Lynn Keller's "Recomposing Ecopoetics: North American Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene," and James Maynard's "Robert Duncan and the Pragmatist Sublime." It notes that several publications address issues of canon formation in African American poetry.

The article discusses scholarly publications about American poetry from the 1900 to the 1950s. These include Sonya Posmentier's Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature," Thomas Travisano's "Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop," and Peter Riley's "Whitman, Melville, Crane, and the Labors of American Poetry: Against Vocation."

The article discusses the 2017 novel "Sing, Unburied, Sing," by Jesmyn Ward. It explores in-depth how Ward has been influenced and inspired by the work of William Faulkner, including in her 2011 novel "Salvage the Bones." Other topics discussed include Faulkner's work "As I Lay Dying," how the character in "Sing, Unburied, Sing," navigates racial dynamics and Black and mixed-race families.

This article reads two early twentieth-century American novels, William Maxwell's They Came Like Swallows (1937) and Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), in relation to the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–19 and the history of public health. Beyond serving as a literary record of "America's forgotten pandemic," it interprets these novels as experiments in what I term "embodied sociality": a biocultural model of social life encompassing both the abstract, symbolic dimensions of community belonging and the concrete, biological contours of collective living made visible through the spread of infectious disease. I argue that Swallows and Pale Horse challenge the logic of "modern health citizenship," which prioritized personal hygiene measures to prevent the spread of influenza through a community, that was promoted in turn-of-the-century public health efforts. Instead, these novels destabilize perceptions of the body as a discrete and potentially impermeable entity, revealing how to belong to a community is to be susceptible to the unseen agents of disease that move between bodies in close proximity, as well as to be, albeit unwittingly, a potential carrier of disease. Attending to embodied sociality as made visible by the flu, these novels necessitate a new way of writing pandemic—one that blends the narrative conventions of plague writing and autopathography. In so doing, I contend, Pale Horse and Swallows invite us to reimagine embodiment and community belonging by holding the local and global, personal and political, individual and collective dimensions of pandemic together. When we recognize pandemic as simultaneously individual and communal, the boundaries that differentiate proximal bodies from one another and from a collective social body blur. And this knowledge, in turn, transforms the way we write pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the published work of North American writer Raymond Carver (1938- 1988), with an emphasis on the absence of aesthetic and social traditions in the background of his fictional universe. It looks at the debates and disagreements between Carver and his editor Gordon Lish over his second collection of short stories--now known as Beginners--as an expression of different forms of dialogue with literary tradition. In Carver's writing there is a dearth of sociocultural references, both on the part of the author and his characters, while Lish emphasizes historical heritage through rupture and fragmentation of the text. This paper introduces the categories of the "beginner" (Carver) and the "initiated" (Lish), which serve not only to clarify the differences between both writers, but also to offer a typology for analyzing temporal and historical components of fictional texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers cross-racial encounters as well as racial mimicry and masquerade in works from the 1940s and 1950s, arguing that thrillers and other works of popular culture prove fertile ground for tracking the intersections of race and masculinity. Popular cultural texts of the period present a surprisingly uniform and articulate resistance to the consolidation of consensus culture. Pulp and paperback fiction reflect a crisis of assimilation on the part of returning white soldiers, depicting their predicament in the rhetoric of alienation and existential despair. Male protagonists resist their socially designated roles as responsible, married, breadwinning members of the managerial and professional classes. In novels by writers ranging from Nelson Algren to Richard Yates, prosperity is depicted as variously undesirable, unachievable, or too loathsome a burden to bear. Movies by directors such as Jules Dassin and John Huston lament the sacrifices men are seemingly compelled to make to enter into middle-class respectability. In these works, African American characters figure as "authentic bearers of alienation." Consequently, the hard-boiled and noir melodramas of male "self-reliance" typically featured white protagonists navigating highly "racialized" and/or ethnic social spaces as they measured existential alienation against the economic disfranchisement. Often, as in Charles Willeford's fiction, such texts adopt a form of literary blackface to articulate discontent with the emerging post-war social order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (1959) employs Freudian theories of maternity to interrogate the subject position of mother within psychoanalysis itself. In the context of a mid-twentieth-century popularization of psychoanalysis, maternity in Hill House challenges the heteronormative foundations of a post-Freudian America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article suggests that the use of the word "sin" by Atticus Finch in the novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee groups him with other characters for whom the term is a mask for prejudice understood as a preconceived opinion not based on reason or actual experience. Topics discussed include the number of times the word "sin" appears in the novel, the novel's perpetually slanted presentation of sin, and the morally and/or politically problematic aspects of the novel.

The article examines the storm as the anthropomorphized protagonist of the short story "A Party Down at the Square" by Ralph Ellison, published posthumously in 1997. Topics discussed include an overview of the story, scholar Barbara Foley's view of the storm as merely symbolic of the story's message and Ellison's aims, and lines of the story which confirm the human narrator's own belief in the storm's disassociation with the violence in the town.

The article discusses the fictitious character known as Deacon Bottle, created by U.S. author Robert Ervine Mahaffay, for pulp fiction magazines and books in the mid-to-late 20th century. According to the article, Deacon Bottle was featured in several stories published in the publication "Star Western." The article examines Mahaffay's background and how his life experience shaped the character of Deacon Bottle, his attempts to enter the pulp market, and his eventual success.

The author explores the idea of an archive of Mexican American literature, how such an archive would contribute to the field of Latino/a literary studies, and how it relates to issues facing Mexican Americans. The author discusses the Mexican American literary canon, the Recovery Project to establish a Hispanic and Mexican American archive, and modern Hispanic American literature.

In this study Faulkner's novel, The Sound and The Fury that is dealt with in terms of tragedy coming about after a central event that affects the characters in the novel. Being one of the most significant writers of 20th century American Literature, Faulkner displays this event and the tragic characters by the help of stream of consciousness technique. This technique assists the reader to figure out the deterioration of the characters in the novel. The aim of the study is to demonstrate how a tragic event can influence people's lives. The study is composed through literature review. It is thought that Faulkner's writing technique helps reader to comprehend and feel the tragic positions and mood of the characters as using stream of consciousness technique, he writes on individuals' thoughts that focus on past events affecting everything. To conclude, the study shows that the writer is so successful in revealing the main tragic event and the tragic characters that reader can viasualize the situations and characters more vividly and also she or he can realizes the consecutive tragedies that overset the lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "Across the River & Into the Trees" by Ernest Hemingway is presented. It outlines the characters and explores their symbolic significance. It examines a correlative of Colonel's spiritual anguish in the face of his imminent death and also mentions about spiritual pilgrimage and sense of guilt for the loss of his regiment along with the Christian virtue of self-sacrificial love. An overview of the story is also given.

W. E. B. Du Bois frequently wrote lists of books that he recommended others to read. One of the most intriguing of these lists occurs in his 1911 novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece. As the hero Bles scans the bookshelf of the heroine Zora, he notes six works or collections of works by name: Plato's Republic, Gorky's Comrades, an encyclopedia of agriculture, Balzac's novels, Spencer's First Principles, and Tennyson's poetry. This essay briefly examines these works and the possible significance of each in the light of Du Bois's ideas, such as the doctrine of the "Talented Tenth," the need for intraracial solidarity among African Americans, Pan-Africanism, and others, as well as the role that the ideas of each of these works may play in the wider context of the novel. Each seems to be representative of some significant aspect of the communal agricultural philosophy of Zora, which, in turn, reflects some of the foundational philosophical commitments of Du Bois himself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline is presented. It outlines the characters and explores their symbolic significance. It examines irony in the preface of the book and the virtual universe of the OASIS, home to a classic videogame museum. An overview of the story is also given.

This paper examines the poetics of perception and the accompanying moral commitments of William Carlos Williams’s poetry, paying attention in particular to the visual ethos of his work. If in his early years Williams conceptualized the poet’s function as “lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses.” One of the chief arguments here is that this emphasis be understood as an expansive and ethically implicating one, rather than in creatively circumscribing terms. “Such war, as the arts live and breathe by,” Williams asserts in 1944, “is continuous.” After establishing the ethical basis for Williams’s poetics, this paper assesses the perceptual politics of his work of the 1940s specifically, and in a number of literary and historical contexts, including: his revisionary engagement with William Wordsworth and the Romantic tradition; his infamous poetic “exultation” at the bombing of London in 1941 and his elegy for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; and his politically complex and often incendiary poems of social observation in these years. As such, this article both reveals and interrogates the sometimes contradictory ethical engagements and creative procedures that define Williams’s work in a period of profound political crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary analysis of the novel "The Human Stain" by Philip Roth is presented. It suggests that the novel uses a jazz framework to address the concept of racial passing as well as to reflect on the impact of storytelling.

The Sun Also Rises (1926) reveals Hemingway’s prescient concerns about the negative impact of mass-tourism on non-human life. But rather than engaging in a full-blown critique of commercial travel, Hemingway instead constructs a difference between tourists like Robert Cohn and the “damned Biarritz swine” and travelers like Jake Barnes. Although the latter rely on the same economic structures as the former, they have, in Hemingway’s eyes, the war wounds and afición which lend them the capacity and the right to enjoy “natural things,” regardless of the social or environmental costs of their enjoyment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Richard Wright is a significant black writer who ushered in a profound change in the twentieth century American literature. His novels primarily deal with the problems of racism and oppression of the black people in America. His famous novel The Outsider (1953) portrays the existential outlook, transformation and tragic fall of a highly intelligent black protagonist Cross Damon. This paper explores the anguish experienced by his psyche when he embarks on a journey of rediscovering his identity and meaning of life by becoming an outsider and removing himself from ethics, law and humanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]