Lionel Trilling was one of the twentieth century's most widely read and influential American literary critics. Mark Krupnick traces Trilling’s career from the 1920s through the 1970s, following the shifting intellectual and ideological currents in his thought. Krupnick places Trilling’s criticism and fiction in the context of his New York intellectual group, illuminating the connection between Trilling’s preoccupation with self-definition and his struggle to achieve a cultural overview in a period marked by contradictions, polarizations, and reversals. He provides not only the best single assessment of Trilling but also an incisive history of American literary criticism through the mid-twentieth century.
Literary Modernism and the Transformation of Work probes the relationship between the aesthetic structures of modernism and its political and philosophical shape. James F. Knapp explores modernism's engagement with and reaction to the theories and discourse of scientific management that were reshaping the workplace in the early twentieth century, and in so doing, he traces "the ways in which a socially dominant discourse of knowledge is reproduced—and challenged—through a series of texts that range from the marginal to the most fully canonized."
This study of the novels of Nathanael West begins with the important threads of West’s life and their relationship to his works. James F. Light gives a detailed analysis of each of West's novels, investigating in particular the works' treatment of social criticism and manipulation of dream and symbol.
Priscilla Meyer’s Nabokov and Indeterminacy traces the impact of the novelist’s early work The Real Life of Sebastian Knight on later novels Lolita and Pale File.
Jacob Gallagher-Ross’s Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage explores the unrecognized centrality of commonplace experience in American theater. Starting from its roots in pragmatic nineteenth-century Transcendentalism, the book shows how the representation of mundane daily life may powerfully illuminate human perception.
Lyrical Strategies is a highly original book that demonstrates how many canonical American novels by authors such as William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Cormac McCarthy can be better understood through the methods of lyrics poetry than those of narrative fiction.
One Foot in the Finite uses Moby-Dick to rethink literary realism. It argues that Melville’s realist writing doesn’t simply depict the physical world but shows how even the most abstract language can powerfully reflect lived experience.
The essays in Visionary of the Word bring together the latest scholarship on Herman Melville’s treatment of religion across his long career as a writer of fiction and poetry.
