Philip K. Dick

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Jonathan P. Davis

Few can argue with the unprecedented success author Stephen King has established in the two decades following the publication of his first novel, Carrie. He has built a reputation as the world's premier storyteller, and his name has become commonplace within the home. American publishers, producers, and fans have all capitalized on his unquestionable ability to entertain. But it is this same success that has often overshadowed the elements of his fiction that contribute to the canvas of literature established in the twentieth century by authors such as William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Flannery O'Connor. All have lasting reputations as masters of the American literary tradition. Stephen King's America aims to heighten awareness of the numerous American issues that resonate throughout King's fiction, issues that bear universal application to the evolution of the human condition. Within his stories can be found a diverse study of all that makes life in America, land of the free, unique: the struggle for moral health; leaving the splendor of childhood at the corruption of innocence; an advanced technology that often exceeds its understood potentials; the rewards and sacrifices within a free-market society; the delicate balance between autonomy and collective social harmony; and the simple solution to survival in an adverse world. Take a closer look at these subtexts and discover a new dimension in the reading of Stephen King's fiction. By focusing on these issues, and by presenting four rich interviews with men close to the work of Stephen King, Stephen King's America lifts the veil that is the surface of his stories, shining a pleasantly distinct light on the sources that are both his subliminal and apparent strengths as a modern author.

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Nigel Harkness

"Whereas the centrality of femininity to nineteenth-century French fiction has been the focus of widespread critical attention, masculinity has, until recently, received little sustained treatment in either the literary or socio-historical domains. In this book, Nigel Harkness uses the fiction of George Sand (1804-76), the pre-eminent woman writer of the period, to explore questions of masculinity as they pertain to the nineteenth-century French novel, and to map out new approaches to the study of literary masculinity." "Drawing on contemporary theories of gender and narrative, Harkness reveals how Sand's novels repeatedly focus on a nexus of language, masculinity and power, in which narrative is both a vehicle for the expression of manhood, and a site where masculinity is discursively performed. Masculinity is thus reconfigured in Sand's fiction as an identity constituted as much through words as through actions. Analysis of these performances of masculinity offers fresh insights into gendered processes of literary representation in the nineteenth-century French novel."--Jacket.

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Kathleen M. Glenn and Janet Pérez

"Cristina Fernandez Cubas is, without question, one of the most important of the Spanish writers who have begun to publish since the end of the Franco dictatorship. Credited with playing a major role in the renaissance of the short story in Spain, she has won national and international acclaim for her fiction. Works by her have been translated into eight languages and have become a staple of university courses on contemporary Peninsular literature. Fernandez Cubas has created a remarkably coherent narrative world, nourished by a core of fundamental concerns. The eleven essays of Mapping the Fiction of Cristina Fernandez Cubas examine the intellectual preoccupations, narrative strategies, and rhetorical devices that distinguish the four volumes of short stories, two novels, the play, and the book of memoirs that she has published to date."--Jacket.

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Christopher Fox and Brenda Tooley

Walking Naboth's Vineyard brings together nine prominent scholars to present new and valuable perspectives on the work of Jonathan Swift. In recent years Swift has been increasingly reconsidered and recast as a distinctly Irish writer, and there is little doubt that his artistic career was shaped by Ireland's troubled political life. Literary critics and scholars, as well as scholars of Irish literature, will find this collection unique in that it explores Swift's life and writing in a distinctively Irish context and considers how Swift was influenced as a member of a population that was divided against itself, colonized by a neighboring kingdom, and politically and culturally marginalized. These essays demonstrate how, despite Swift's ambivalence about his Irish nationality, he found Ireland's worldly position a close parallel to his own complex position in the political and cultural worlds in which he lived.