American author Willa Cather was born and spent her first nine years in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Here, as an observant daughter of a privileged white family, Cather first encountered differences and dislocations that remained lively, productive, and sometimes deeply troubling sites of tension and energy throughout her writing life.The essays in Cather Studies, Volume 14 seek to unsettle prevailing assumptions about Cather’s work as she moved from Virginia to Nebr...

A compilation of essays focusing on the significance of material culture to Cather’s work and Cather scholarship.Willa Cather and Material Culture is a collection of 11 new essays that tap into a recent and resurgent interest among Cather scholars in addressing her work and her career through the lens of cultural studies. One of the volume's primary purposes is to demonstrate the extent to which Cather did participate in her culture and to correct the comm...

As the first collection dedicated to the relationship between television and the U.S. South, Small-Screen Souths addresses the growing interest in how mass culture represents the region and influences popular perceptions of it. In sixteen essays divided into three thematic sections, scholars of southern culture analyze representations of the South in a variety of television shows spanning the history of the medium, from classic network programs such as The Andy Griffith Show

From Dorothy's modest Kansas farm, to the yellow-brick road, from the Wicked Witch of the West to the Emerald City, unforgettable icons abound in L. Frank Baum's classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. One of the most memorable stories in American history, this tale has spawned plays, sequels, and most notably the innovative 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz. With this brand new recording, follow Dorothy as she meets Munchkins, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsman and the Cowardly Lion. This edition is n...

In the heart of the American wilderness, courage was their only weapon — and loyalty their greatest bond. In The Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper brings to life one of the most powerful and enduring adventures in American literature — a story of war, love, and the clash between two worlds. Set during the French and Indian War, the novel follows Natty Bumppo (Hawkeye) and his Mohican companions, Chingachgook and Uncas, as they risk everything to protect Cora and Alice Munro, t...

William Shawn once called The Talk of the Town the soul of the magazine. The section began in the first issue, in 1925. But it wasn't until a couple of years later, when E. B. White and James Thurber arrived, that the Talk of the Town story became what it is today: a precise piece of journalism that always gets the story and has a little fun along the way.The Fun of It is the first anthology of Talk pieces that spans the magazine's life. ...

A book about the meaning of travel, about how important the topic has been for writers for two and a half centuries, and about how excellent the literature of travel happened to be in England and America in the 1920s and 30s.

Envy, irritation, paranoia—in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions like anger, these non-cathartic states of feeling are associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended. In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity.Along with her inquiry into the aesthetics of unprestigi...

A comprehensive account of the author's entire career through the lens of her recently published diariesWith the publication of Susan Sontag's diaries, the development of her career can now be evaluated in a more genetic sense, so that the origins of her ideas and plans for publication are made plain in the context of her role as a public intellectual, who is increasingly aware of her impact on her culture. In Understanding Susan Sontag, Carl Rollyson not ...

The New Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner offers contemporary readers a sample of innovative approaches to interpreting and appreciating William Faulkner, who continues to inspire passionate readership worldwide. The essays here address a variety of topics in Faulkner's fiction, such as its reflection of the concurrent emergence of cinema, social inequality and rights movements, modern ways of imagining sexual identity and behavior, the South's history as a plantation economy and soc...

With essays by Edwin T. Arnold, J. Douglas Canfield, Christine Chollier, George Guillemin, Dianne C. Luce, Jacqueline Scoones, Phillip A. Snyder, Nell Sullivan, and John WegnerThe completion of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy--All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998)--marked a major achievement in American literature. Only ten years earlier this now internationally acclaimed novelist had been called the best unkno...

Rough Draft: The Modernist Diaries of Emily Holmes Coleman, 1929-1937 is an edited selection, published here for the first time, of the diaries kept by American poet and novelist Coleman during her years as an expatriate in the modernist hubs of France and England. During her time abroad, Coleman developed as a surrealist writer, publishing a novel, The Shutter of Snow, and poems in little magazines like transition. She also began her life’s work, her diary, which was sustained for over fo...