Shares more than eight hundred haiku written during the last eighteen months of the author's life

Before coming to national attention for his novel "Sister Carrie", Theodore Dreiser worked for nearly a decade as a magazine editor and freelance writer. In this volume, liberally seasoned with period illustrations, Yoshinobu Hakutani has collected and annotated a rich selection of Dreiser's early writings on the cultural milieu of his day. In these brief essays, Dreiser sallies into the vibrant world of creative work in turn-of-the-century America. He inspects the eccentric and revealing paraphernalia of artists' studios, probes the work habits of writers, and goes behind the scenes in the popular song-writing business, where this week's celebrity is next week's has-been. He notes the proliferation of organizations such as the Camera Club of New York and the American Water-Color Society and profiles or interviews famous figures such as Alfred Stieglitz, William Dean Howells, and the legendary impresario Major James Burton Pond. He also introduces numerous women artists, novelists, and musicians, including the prolific and tireless Amelia Barr (mother of fourteen children and author of thirty-two novels), the illustrator Alice B. Stephens, and the opera singer Lillian Nordica. Hakutani's notes provide biographical detail on dozens of now-obscure individuals mentioned by Dreiser. Bubbling up through Dreiser's observations and reflections are a keen curiosity about the creative process and a passion for identifying the peculiarly American spirit reflected in the young nation's artists and their work. These miniature portraits of the people who were the talk of the town at the turn of the century capture American culture at a moment when the United States was intent on demonstrating its ability to produce fine art and literature worthy of European models yet distinctively its own.

Product Description: This collection of eleven essays concerns postmodernity in cross-culturalism, a contiguous literary movement from modernity in East-West literary criticism. Most of the contributions address particular cross-cultural relations such as postcolonialism in Indian literature and paganism in Spanish culture...read more

Product Description: This collection brings together the work of critics who approach Dreiser from psychoanalytical, feminist, new historicist, culturalist, and comparatist perspectives. Based on the works of the Pennsylvania Edition, several of the essays examine old, neglected, or unpublished texts, and explore questions of intertextuality and interauthority that recent reading has brought to light...read more

Product Description: An analysis of Wright's work both as an art and as a discourse on race. Taking into consideration the social and cultural milieu of Wright's time, the author compares and contrasts Wright's works with those by other writers dealing with similar subjects.

This volume contains a selection of prose from Noguchi's autobiography, The Story of Yone Noguchi Told by Himself. It casts a significant light not only upon Noguchi the transcultural poet and critic, but also upon the entire history of the relationship between modern Japan and the West.

Product Description: This collection of Dreiser's early periodical writings covers his articles on American literary figures; art and music criticism; the American landscape; and science, technology, and industry; and his writings about the changing social conditions in American cities that he later drew on in his naturalistic novels...read more

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Product Description: This critical analysis of Theodore Dreiser's early career challenges the conventional view of Dreiser as a novelist who depicted a world in which human creatures are hopelessly entangled in a meaningless and ferocious struggle for existence...read more