Showing results by publisher "University Press Audiobooks" in United States

Drawing on the example of post-WWII Britain and looking ahead at America in the 2020s, Jed Esty suggests that becoming a second-place nation is neither disastrous, as alarmists claim, nor avoidable, as optimists insist. Contemporary declinism often masks white nostalgia and perpetuates a conservative longing for Cold War certainty. But the narcissistic lure of "lost greatness" appeals across the political spectrum.

The mother-daughter partnership that produced the Little House books has fascinated scholars and readers alike. Now, John E. Miller, one of America’s leading authorities on Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane, combines analyses of both women to explore this collaborative process and shows how their books reflect the authors’ distinctive views of place, time, and culture. He also addresses two controversial issues: How much did Lane actually contribute to the writing of the Little House books, and what was Wilder’s real attitude toward American Indians?

Ralph F. Voss examines Capote and In Cold Blood from many perspectives, not only as the crowning achievement of Capote's career, but also as a story in itself, focusing on Capote's artfully composed text, his extravagant claims for it as reportage, and its larger status in American popular culture.

Writing was the central passion of Emerson's life. While his thoughts on the craft are well developed in "The Poet", "The American Scholar", Nature, "Goethe", and "Persian Poetry", less well known are the many pages in his private journals devoted to the relationship between writing and reading. Here, for the first time, is the Concord Sage's energetic, exuberant, and unconventional advice on the idea of writing, focused and distilled by the preeminent Emerson biographer at work today.

A decade and a half before surprising the world with a book of Civil War poetry, Herman Melville was already confident of what was “poetic” in his prose. As Hershel Parker demonstrates in this book, Melville was steeped in poetry long before he called himself a poet. Here Parker, the dean of Melville studies, gives a compelling, in-depth account of how one of America’s greatest writers grew into the vocation of a poet. 

The romance novel has the strange distinction of being the most popular but least respected of literary genres. While it remains consistently dominant in bookstores and on best-seller lists, it is also widely dismissed by the critical community. Scholars have alleged that romance novels help create subservient readers, who are largely women, by confining heroines to stories that ignore issues other than love and marriage.

Samuel Clemens first encountered the Bermuda Islands in 1867 on a return voyage from the Holy Land and found them much to his liking. One of the most isolated spots in the world, Bermuda offered the writer a refuge from his harried and sometimes sad existence on the mainland, and this island paradise called him back another seven times. Clemens found that Bermuda’s beauty, pace, weather, and company were just the medicine he needed, and its seafaring culture with few connections to the outside world appealed to his love of travel by water.

Ayn Rand and her philosophical school, Objectivism, have had a considerable influence upon American popular culture, yet the true story of her life and work has yet to be told. In this book, Jeff Walker debunks the cult-like following that developed around the author of the classics Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead - a cult that persists even today.

Mark Twain, American Humorist examines the ways that Mark Twain’s reputation developed at home and abroad in the period between 1865 and 1882, years in which he went from a regional humorist to national and international fame. In the late 1860s, Mark Twain became the exemplar of a school of humor that was thought to be uniquely American.

Walt Kelly (1913-1973) is one of the most respected and innovative American cartoonists of the twentieth century. His long-running Pogo newspaper strip has been cited by modern comics artists and scholars as one of the best ever. Cartoonists Bill Watterson ( Calvin and Hobbes), Jeff Smith ( Bone), and Frank Cho ( Liberty Meadows) have all cited Kelly as a major influence on their work. We Go Pogo is the first comprehensive study of Kelly's cartoon art and his larger career in the comics business.

Gene Logsdon's The Man Who Created Paradise is a message of hope at a time when the very concept of earth stewardship is under attack. The fable, inspired by a true story, tells how Wally Spero looked at one of the bleakest places in America -- a raw and barren strip-mined landscape -- and saw in it his escape from the drudgery of his factory job. He bought an old bulldozer and used the machine to carve patiently, acre by acre, a beautiful little farm out of a seemingly worthless wasteland.

Script Culture and the American Screenplay treats the screenplay as a literary work in its own right, presenting analyses of screenplays from a variety of frameworks, including feminism, Marxism, structuralism, philosophy, and psychology. Boon demonstrates that whether we are concerned with aesthetics and identifying rules for distinguishing the literary from the non-literary, or whether we align ourselves with more contemporary theories, which recognize texts as distinguishable in their inter-relationships.

In 1910, when Olaf F. Larson was born to tenant livestock and tobacco farmers in Rock County, Wisconsin, the original barn still stood on the property. It was filled with artifacts of an earlier time - an ox yoke, a grain cradle, a scythe used to cut hay by hand. But Larson came of age in a brave new world of modern inventions - tractors, trucks, combines, airplanes - that would change farming and rural life forever. When Horses Pulled the Plow is Larson's account of that rural life in the early 20th century.

A noted scholar offers fresh ways of looking at two legendary American authors. Both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway came into their own in the 1920s and did some of their best writing during that decade. Ronald Berman considers an array of novels and short stories by both authors within the context of the decade's popular culture, philosophy, and intellectual history.

Conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker have fascinated the world since the 19th century. In her captivating book, Chang and Eng Reconnected, Cynthia Wu traces the "Original Siamese Twins" through the terrain of American culture, showing how their inseparability underscored tensions between individuality and collectivity in the American popular imagination.

Many authors have been accused of betraying their loved ones by turning them into fictional characters. In The Treacherous Imagination, Robert McGill examines the ethics of writing such stories. He argues that while fiction has long appealed to audiences with its narratives of private life, contemporary autobiographical fiction channels a widespread ambivalence about the value of telling all in a confessional age - an age in which fiction has an unprecedented power to leave people feeling libeled or exposed when they recognize themselves in it.

In 1876, Poland's leading actress, Helena Modrzejewska, accompanied by family and friends, emigrated to Southern California to establish a utopian commune that soon failed. Within a year Modrzejewska made her debut in the title role of Adrienne Lecouvreur at San Francisco's California Theatre. She changed her name to Modjeska and quickly became a leading star on the American stage, where she reigned for the next 30 years.

In Vigilantes and Lynch Mobs, Arellano closely examines such narratives as well as the work of western historian and archivist Hubert Howe Bancroft, who was sympathetic to them and that of Ida B. Wells, who wrote in fierce opposition to lynching. Tracing the creation, maintenance, and circulation of dominant, alternative, and oppositional vigilante stories from the 19th century frontier through the Jim Crow South, she casts new light on the role of narrative in creating a knowable past.

Examining “the moment” as one of the primary motifs of Beat writing, Erik Mortenson offers the first book to investigate immediacy and its presence and importance in Beat writing. Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence places an expanded canon of Beat writers in an early postmodern context that highlights their importance in American poetics and provides an account of Beat practices that reveal how gender and race affect Beat politics of the moment.

In his highly anticipated sequel to the critically acclaimed Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story, Robert Paul Lamb delivers a dazzling analysis of the craft of this influential writer. Lamb scrutinizes a selection of Hemingway's exemplary stories to illuminate the author's methods of construction and to show how craft criticism complements and enhances cultural literary studies