Product Description: Taking a distinctively aesthetic approach to the genre of realist short fiction, Kerry McSweeney clusters the work of five masters - Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, and Raymond Carver - to offer a poetics of the form for students and scholars...read more

Product Description: Two conspicuous features of the radical transformation of literary studies over the past three decades have been the dominance of theory-based interpretative discourse and cultural studies contextualizations. Both have greatly energized literary studies - but they have done so at a cost...read more

Product Description: McSweeney discusses the sensory acuity that informed Wordsworth's, Coleridge's, Thoreau's, Whitman's, and Dickinson's finest achievements and then, when blunted by illness or age, contributed to an attenuation of their creative power...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The Victorian poetry of sexual love between men and women has not been as fully studied as other components of the imaginative literature of the period, and some of the attention it has received has been more concerned with the society and ideology of the age than with the poetry or the love...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In this literary life, the fiction of Marian Evans (George Eliot) is placed in a biographical and literary-historical context. Since the life experiences that most influenced her novels were those of her formative years, biographical information becomes less important after the publication of her first novel in 1859, when she was in her 40th year...read more

Describes the background Ralph Ellison's novel, discusses its major themes, and looks at its critical reception

Traces the life and political career of Krushchev, explains how he became head of the Russian government, and attempts to describe his complex personality