The Critical Response to Erskine Caldwell

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Author :
Publisher : Greenwood
ISBN 13 : 0313300720
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (133 download)

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Book Synopsis The Critical Response to Erskine Caldwell by : Robert McDonald

Download or read book The Critical Response to Erskine Caldwell written by Robert McDonald and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 1997-08-26 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author of such classics of 20th-century popular American literature as Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933), Erskine Caldwell was something of a celebrity nearly all his life. But he was also a serious writer, one whose merits are as considerable as they remain underexplored. In the 1930s, he startled the literary world with his frank portrayals of the poor whites of the South. Beginning in the early 1940s, critics grew suspicious that he had exhausted his originality and his talent. In the late 1960s, some scholars began an effort, which continues intermittently today, to reconsider Caldwell's achievement. This collection of reviews, critical essays, and book excerpts provides a chronological portrait of the often contradictory and unfailingly colorful critical response to Caldwell from 1931 to the present. The 57 pieces collected in this volume were chosen to represent all sides and perspectives in the evolving critical opinion of Caldwell's work. The items are grouped in sections representing three chronological periods that encompass the prevailing critical moods concerning his writings: the 1930s, when readers of many persuasions found him promising and held out great hopes for his development; 1940 to 1968, when increasing critical scrutiny led to his dismissal as a writer of significance; and 1969 to the present, when there have been several substantial efforts to reconsider Caldwell's achievement. An introductory essay argues that Caldwell remains largely absent from our critical consciousness today because of a prevailing willingness among academics to rely on largely negative received opinions about his books in place of primary experience with them. The introduction is followed by a chronology, and the volume concludes with an extensive selected bibliography.

Reading Erskine Caldwell

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Author :
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 0786423439
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (864 download)

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Book Synopsis Reading Erskine Caldwell by : Robert L. McDonald

Download or read book Reading Erskine Caldwell written by Robert L. McDonald and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2006-01-10 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Erskine Caldwell has been compared to literary giants like Faulkner and Hemingway, yet he has also been reviled as peddler of pop trash. Was he a genius, or just a shooting star whose brilliance faded long before he stopped writing? Caldwell began his career in the late 1920s and gained fame for revealing the gritty backwoods South in novels such as his seminal Tobacco Road. He wrote prolifically, sometimes as much as a book a year. As the editor of this book maintains, perhaps anyone who wrote so much would inevitably stumble. These 12 essays explore a variety of issues. They discuss Caldwell as humorist, social commentator, modernist, and revolutionary novelist. They examine his themes and tropes (political images, social injustice, the environment, ideological struggles) and his use of artistic devices (short stories, cubist strategies, repetition). A generous bibliography includes not only books on Caldwell but also chapters and forewords, journal articles, essays, news items and obituaries. The reader is encouraged to look at Caldwell with fresh eyes, to press beyond his controversial image, and to compare his works, especially his early ones, to those of any of the top names in literature.

The Critical Response to Erskine Caldwell

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Author :
Publisher : Greenwood
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 344 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis The Critical Response to Erskine Caldwell by : Robert McDonald

Download or read book The Critical Response to Erskine Caldwell written by Robert McDonald and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 1997-08-26 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author of such classics of 20th-century popular American literature as Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933), Erskine Caldwell was something of a celebrity nearly all his life. But he was also a serious writer, one whose merits are as considerable as they remain underexplored. In the 1930s, he startled the literary world with his frank portrayals of the poor whites of the South. Beginning in the early 1940s, critics grew suspicious that he had exhausted his originality and his talent. In the late 1960s, some scholars began an effort, which continues intermittently today, to reconsider Caldwell's achievement. This collection of reviews, critical essays, and book excerpts provides a chronological portrait of the often contradictory and unfailingly colorful critical response to Caldwell from 1931 to the present. The 57 pieces collected in this volume were chosen to represent all sides and perspectives in the evolving critical opinion of Caldwell's work. The items are grouped in sections representing three chronological periods that encompass the prevailing critical moods concerning his writings: the 1930s, when readers of many persuasions found him promising and held out great hopes for his development; 1940 to 1968, when increasing critical scrutiny led to his dismissal as a writer of significance; and 1969 to the present, when there have been several substantial efforts to reconsider Caldwell's achievement. An introductory essay argues that Caldwell remains largely absent from our critical consciousness today because of a prevailing willingness among academics to rely on largely negative received opinions about his books in place of primary experience with them. The introduction is followed by a chronology, and the volume concludes with an extensive selected bibliography.

God's Little Acre

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Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.X/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis God's Little Acre by : Erskine Caldwell

Download or read book God's Little Acre written by Erskine Caldwell and published by . This book was released on 1940 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Peculiar Whiteness

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Author :
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 1496832558
Total Pages : 195 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (968 download)

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Book Synopsis Peculiar Whiteness by : Justin Mellette

Download or read book Peculiar Whiteness written by Justin Mellette and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2021-03-01 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peculiar Whiteness: Racial Anxiety and Poor Whites in Southern Literature, 1900–1965 argues for deeper consideration of the complexities surrounding the disparate treatment of poor whites throughout southern literature and attests to how broad such experiences have been. While the history of prejudice against this group is not the same as the legacy of violence perpetrated against people of color in America, individuals regarded as “white trash” have suffered a dehumanizing process in the writings of various white authors. Poor white characters are frequently maligned as grotesque and anxiety inducing, especially when they are aligned in close proximity to blacks or to people with disabilities. Thus, as a symbol, much has been asked of poor whites, and various iterations of the label (e.g., “white trash,” tenant farmers, or even people with a little less money than average) have been subject to a broad spectrum of judgment, pity, compassion, fear, and anxiety. Peculiar Whiteness engages key issues in contemporary critical race studies, whiteness studies, and southern studies, both literary and historical. Through discussions of authors including Charles Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon, Sutton Griggs, Erskine Caldwell, Lillian Smith, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor, we see how whites in a position of power work to maintain their status, often by finding ways to recategorize and marginalize people who might not otherwise have seemed to fall under the auspices or boundaries of “white trash.”

The Centaur

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Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 067964587X
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (796 download)

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Book Synopsis The Centaur by : John Updike

Download or read book The Centaur written by John Updike and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND THE PRIX DU MEILLEUR LIVRE ÉTRANGER The Centaur is a modern retelling of the legend of Chiron, the noblest and wisest of the centaurs, who, painfully wounded yet unable to die, gave up his immortality on behalf of Prometheus. In the retelling, Olympus becomes small-town Olinger High School; Chiron is George Caldwell, a science teacher there; and Prometheus is Caldwell’s fifteen-year-old son, Peter. Brilliantly conflating the author’s remembered past with tales from Greek mythology, John Updike translates Chiron’s agonized search for relief into the incidents and accidents of three winter days spent in rural Pennsylvania in 1947. The result, said the judges of the National Book Award, is “a courageous and brilliant account of a conflict in gifts between an inarticulate American father and his highly articulate son.”

Kneel to the Rising Sun

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (438 download)

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Book Synopsis Kneel to the Rising Sun by : Erskine Caldwell

Download or read book Kneel to the Rising Sun written by Erskine Caldwell and published by . This book was released on 1954 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Erskine Caldwell

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Author :
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Erskine Caldwell by : Erskine Caldwell

Download or read book Erskine Caldwell written by Erskine Caldwell and published by McFarland. This book was released on 1999 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I'm just an ordinary writer," Erskine Caldwell once wrote. "I'm not trying to sell anything; I'm not trying to buy anything. I'm just trying to present my vision of life." His ostensibly unsolicitous vision of Southern grotesques, of the slack-jawed, pellagra-ridden sharecroppers, repressed farmwives, and oversexed nymphets, elicited, however, anything but an "ordinary" response. Hailed by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins, reviled by others as a pornographer or sensationalist, Caldwell was once called "America's most popular author." Once the furor flagged, Caldwell was relegated to the "mansions of subliterature," where his reputation resides today. This book contains more than 150 previously unpublished letters, notes, telegrams, and postcards written between 1929 and 1955, at the peak of Caldwell's popularity and influence, all extensively annotated. The Introduction assays Caldwell's significance in American popular culture and literary studies and establishes the importance of Caldwell's correspondence as a means of understanding the intentions of a man who was otherwise terse and unforthcoming about his work.

The World of William Saroyan

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Publisher : Bucknell University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780838753682
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (536 download)

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Book Synopsis The World of William Saroyan by : Nona Balakian

Download or read book The World of William Saroyan written by Nona Balakian and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this work, the author tells how Saroyan transformed the short story by personalizing it and by loosening the structure of the novella form. He went on to bring new life to the theater and to the telling of autobiography. Better than that of any recent drama critic, Balakian's chapters on the theater place Saroyan's plays in the larger framework of the American theater of his time and achieve the creation of a total picture of the state of the American theater of the 1930s.

Delta Wedding

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Publisher : HMH
ISBN 13 : 0547538685
Total Pages : 339 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (475 download)

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Book Synopsis Delta Wedding by : Eudora Welty

Download or read book Delta Wedding written by Eudora Welty and published by HMH. This book was released on 1979-03-21 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This novel of a Mississippi family in the 1920s “presents the essence of the Deep South and does it with infinite finesse” (The Christian Science Monitor). From one of the most treasured American writers, winner of a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, comes Delta Wedding, a vivid and charming portrait of Southern life. Set in 1923, the story is centered on the Fairchilds, a big and clamorous family, who live on a plantation in the Mississippi delta. They are in the midst of planning their daughter’s wedding when a nine-year-old relative, Laura McRaven, whose mother has just died, comes to visit. Drama leads to drama, revelation to revelation, in a novel that is “nothing short of wonderful” (The New Yorker). The result is a sometimes-riotous view of a Southern family, and the parentless child who learns to become one of them.

Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression

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Author :
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393338762
Total Pages : 625 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (933 download)

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Book Synopsis Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression by : Morris Dickstein

Download or read book Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression written by Morris Dickstein and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-09-06 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cultural history of the 1930s explores the anxiety, despair, and optimism of the period, exploring how the period culture provided a dynamic lift to the country's morale.

The Haymeadow

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Author :
Publisher : Yearling
ISBN 13 : 0440409233
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (44 download)

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Book Synopsis The Haymeadow by : Gary Paulsen

Download or read book The Haymeadow written by Gary Paulsen and published by Yearling. This book was released on 1994-02-01 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fourteen-year-old John Barron is asked, like his father and grandfather before him, to spend the summer taking care of their sheep in the haymeadow. Six thousand sheep. John will be alone, except for two horses, four dogs, and all those sheep. John doesn't feel up to the task, but he hopes that if he can accomplish it, he will finally please his father. But John finds that the adage "things just to sheep" is true when the river floods, coyotes attack, and one dog's feet get cut. Through it all he must rely on his own resourcefulness, ingenuity, and talents to survive this summer in the haymeadow.

The People's Writer

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Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 9780813916279
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (162 download)

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Book Synopsis The People's Writer by : Wayne Mixon

Download or read book The People's Writer written by Wayne Mixon and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most critics have considered Caldwell to be only a minor southern writer, often associating him with his worst writing. Yet Saul Bellow suggested he deserved the Nobel Prize, and William Faulkner once characterized him as one of the five best writers of his time, alongside himself, Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos.

The Heavenly Table

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Author :
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0385541309
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (855 download)

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Book Synopsis The Heavenly Table by : Donald Ray Pollock

Download or read book The Heavenly Table written by Donald Ray Pollock and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2016-07-12 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Donald Ray Pollock, author of the highly acclaimed The Devil All the Time and Knockemstiff, comes a dark, gritty, electrifying (and, disturbingly, weirdly funny) new novel that will solidify his place among the best contemporary American authors. It is 1917, in that sliver of border land that divides Georgia from Alabama. Dispossessed farmer Pearl Jewett ekes out a hardscrabble existence with his three young sons: Cane (the eldest; handsome; intelligent); Cob (short; heavy set; a bit slow); and Chimney (the youngest; thin; ill-tempered). Several hundred miles away in southern Ohio, a farmer by the name of Ellsworth Fiddler lives with his son, Eddie, and his wife, Eula. After Ellsworth is swindled out of his family's entire fortune, his life is put on a surprising, unforgettable, and violent trajectory that will directly lead him to cross paths with the Jewetts. No good can come of it. Or can it? In the gothic tradition of Flannery O'Connor and Cormac McCarthy with a healthy dose of cinematic violence reminiscent of Sam Peckinpah, Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers, the Jewetts and the Fiddlers will find their lives colliding in increasingly dark and horrific ways, placing Donald Ray Pollock firmly in the company of the genre's literary masters.

In the Shadow of the Black Beast

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Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780807137536
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (375 download)

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Book Synopsis In the Shadow of the Black Beast by : Andrew B. Leiter

Download or read book In the Shadow of the Black Beast written by Andrew B. Leiter and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2010-05 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Andrew B. Leiter presents the first book-length study of the sexually violent African American man, or "black beast," as a composite literary phenomenon. According to Leiter, the black beast theme served as a fundamental link between the Harlem and Southern Renaissances, with writers from both movements exploring its psychological, cultural, and social ramifications. Indeed, Leiter asserts that the two groups consciously engaged one another's work as they struggled to define roles for black masculinity in a society that viewed the black beast as the raison d'être for segregation. Leiter begins by tracing the nineteenth-century origins of the black beast image, and then provides close readings of eight writers who demonstrate the crucial impact anxieties about black masculinity and interracial sexuality had on the formation of American literary modernism. James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Walter White's The Fire in the Flint, George Schuyler's Black No More, William Faulkner's Light in August, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, Allen Tate's The Fathers, Erskine Caldwell's Trouble in July, and Richard Wright's Native Son, as well as other works, provide strong evidence that perceptions of black male sexual violence shaped segregation, protest traditions, and the literature that arose from them. Leiter maintains that the environment of southern race relations -- which allowed such atrocities as the Atlanta riot of 1906, numerous lynchings, Virginia's Racial Integrity Act, and the Scottsboro trials -- influenced in part the development of both the Harlem and Southern Renaissances. While the black beast image had the most pernicious impact on African American individual and communal identities, he says the "threat" of black masculinity also shaped concepts of white national and communal identities, as well as white femininity and masculinity. In the Shadow of the Black Beast signals a fresh interpretation of a literary stereotype within its social and historical context.

Literary Obscenities

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Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271081678
Total Pages : 236 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis Literary Obscenities by : Erik M. Bachman

Download or read book Literary Obscenities written by Erik M. Bachman and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2018-03-14 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comparative historical study explores the broad sociocultural factors at play in the relationships among U.S. obscenity laws and literary modernism and naturalism in the early twentieth century. Putting obscenity case law’s crisis of legitimation and modernism’s crisis of representation into dialogue, Erik Bachman shows how obscenity trials and other attempts to suppress allegedly vulgar writing in the United States affected a wide-ranging debate about the power of the printed word to incite emotion and shape behavior. Far from seeking simply to transgress cultural norms or sexual boundaries, Bachman argues, proscribed authors such as Wyndham Lewis, Erskine Caldwell, Lillian Smith, and James T. Farrell refigured the capacity of writing to evoke the obscene so that readers might become aware of the social processes by which they were being turned into mass consumers, voyeurs, and racialized subjects. Through such efforts, these writers participated in debates about the libidinal efficacy of language with a range of contemporaries, from behavioral psychologists and advertising executives to book cover illustrators, magazine publishers, civil rights activists, and judges. Focusing on case law and the social circumstances informing it, Literary Obscenities provides an alternative conceptual framework for understanding obscenity’s subjugation of human bodies, desires, and identities to abstract social forces. It will appeal especially to scholars of American literature, American studies, and U.S. legal history.

A Man in Full

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Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 1429960698
Total Pages : 756 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (299 download)

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Book Synopsis A Man in Full by : Tom Wolfe

Download or read book A Man in Full written by Tom Wolfe and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 756 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bonfire of the Vanities defined an era--and established Tom Wolfe as our prime fictional chronicler of America at its most outrageous and alive. With A Man in Full, the time the setting is Atlanta, Georgia--a racially mixed late-century boomtown full of fresh wealth, avid speculators, and worldly-wise politicians. Big men. Big money. Big games. Big libidos. Big trouble. The protagonist is Charles Croker, once a college football star, now a late-middle-aged Atlanta real-estate entrepreneur turned conglomerate king, whose expansionist ambitions and outsize ego have at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 28,000-acre quail-shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife--and a half-empty office tower with a staggering load of debt. When star running back Fareek Fanon--the pride of one of Atlanta's grimmest slums--is accused of raping an Atlanta blueblood's daughter, the city's delicate racial balance is shattered overnight. Networks of illegal Asian immigrants crisscrossing the continent, daily life behind bars, shady real-estate syndicates, cast-off first wives of the corporate elite, the racially charged politics of college sports--Wolfe shows us the disparate worlds of contemporary America with all the verve, wit, and insight that have made him our most phenomenal, most admired contemporary novelist. A Man in Full is a 1998 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.