Presents the drama version of Steinbeck's story of the Joad family's struggle for survival during the Depression.

This book charts how the cartographies of American literature as an institutional category have varied radically across different times and places. Arguing that American literature was consolidated as a distinctively nationalist entity only in the wake of the U.S. Civil War, Paul Giles identifies this formation as extending until the beginning of the Reagan presidency in 1981. He contrasts this with the more amorphous boundaries of American culture...

Jonah Siegel, Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University, is the author of Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art (Princeton). For centuries, southern Europe, and Italy in particular, has offered writers far more than an evocative setting for important works of literature. The voyage south has been an integral part of the imagination of inspiration. Haunted Museum is a groundbreaking, in-depth look at fantasies of Italy...

"From Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) to The Fisher King (2000), Paule Marshall's novels, novellas, and short stories include a rich cast of unforgettable men, women, and children who forge spiritual as well as emotional and geographical paths toward their ancestors. In this, the first critical study to address all of Marshall's fiction, Moira Ferguson argues that Marshall's work collectively constitutes a multigenerational saga of the African diaspora...

Stanley Cavell, one of America's most distinguished philosophers, has written an invaluable companion volume to Walden, a seminal book in our cultural heritage. This expanded edition includes two essays on Emerson.

The first extensive treatment of Sherwood Anderson's work from a postmodern perspective. Sherwood Anderson, remembered chiefly as a writer of short stories about life in the Midwest at the turn of the century, was acknowledged as an innovator of the short story form and a major influence on such writers as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Valuable critical studies have examined his works from biographical, New Critical, or psychoanalytical approaches,...

"This treasure trove for book lovers explores fifteen classic novels with memorable maternal figures, and examines how our cultural notions of motherhood have been shaped by literature. Sweet, supportive, dependable, selfless. Long before she had children of her own, journalist Carrie Mullins knew how mothers should behave. But how? Where did these expectations come from-and, more importantly, are they serving the mothers whose lives they shape? Carrie's...

This collection of essays discusses the historical background, themes, characterization, dramatic structure, and staging of Arthur Miller's famous play about the Salem witch trials.

The hopes, fears, and regrets of the residents of a small Ohio town in the 1890s are the stuff of these short stories. Each chapter tells the story of a different citizen of Winesburg. A thread running through the stories is George Willard, a young reporter for the town newspaper, whose wanderings take him all over the town and its surrounding area, and eventually take him away from Winesburg, in order to pursue his dreams and to avoid the life of...

This book includes eighteen critical essays on "The Merchant of Venice" and a biography of William Shakespeare.