Propertius

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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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Kole Omotoso

This is a controversial new study on Africa's two most widely read and, arguably, her finest writers. Despite their shared levels of prestige, each represents a distinct pole of Nigerian writing. On the one hand, there's Soyinka, the playful imagist steeped in the myth and magic of his native Yoruba culture; at the other end of the spectrum, Achebe's internalized Igbo cultural traditions. Kole Omotoso - himself a prolific writer and prize-winning Nigerian novelist - explores and defines the differences in style, background, and vision between the two men. Individual chapters describe their childhood, their cultural influences, political involvement, their stand during the Nigerian civil war, their attitudes to the world at large, their contribution to the language debate in African literatures, and there is also a chapter devoted to Achebe's and Soyinka's responses to their critics. The works of Achebe and Soyinka are considered against three main agendas: the pan-African agenda, the Nigerian nation-state agenda, and the ethnic national agenda. Despite their shared nationality, their contribution towards creating 'a community of sensibilities' in Nigeria is questioned by the author in terms of the instability that has bedevilled Nigeria and, by extension, other African countries.

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J. Madison Davis

An analysis of the work of the mystery and adventure writer with biographical information and interviews with the author and his wife.