Product Description
Key Features:*Study methods *Introduction to the text *Summaries with critical notes *Themes and techniques *Textual analysis of key passages *Author biography *Historical and literary background *Modern and historical critical approaches *Chronology *Glossary of literary terms ... Read more

Product Description
Part of a series of literature guides designed for GCSE coursework requirements, this book contains - author details, background to the work, summaries of the text, critical commentaries, analysis of characterization, and sample questions with guideline answers. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A rewardingrereading of the American literary tradition
Cushing Strout is one of America's foremost men of letters. His broad learning enables him to provide insights into life and literature that give a sense of his deep understanding of American civilization as a whole. In this set of illuminating essays he reads and rereads a number of of American writers: Franklin, Melville, Henry James Jr., Fitgerald, Howells. Henry Adams,Frederic, Updike, Wharton, Cahan, Emerson, Whitman , William James, Twain, Doctorow, Twain,Faulkner ,Wright, Ellison, Alice Walker. He touches upon a wide variety of American themes, the theme of upward mobility, the theme of literary paternity in the pragmatic movement , the theme love triangle and its religious aspect,the theme of reform between the sexes, the theme of conflict of manners among regions, and classes, thetheme of the fictionalizing of history, the theme ofAmerican problems of slavery and race. In this work Professor Strout shows how writers in responding to the visions of others make revisions , and new visions of their own. In so doing he shows how the American literary tradition has been time and again renewed.
This is a work rich in ideas written with the literary grace of a true scholar - master. It could not be recommended more highly. ... Read more

Product Description
Introduction to the life and accomplishments of famed African-American author and activist, Alice Walker. ... Read more

Product Description
While Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston are often linked together, few scholars have looked critically and systematically at what the two actually have in common. This study documents the many ways that Hurston has influenced Walker and demonstrates how Walker, by taking the best of Hurston and making it live in striking new ways, has accorded Hurston a literary immortality apart from that which Hurston earned in her own right. In so doing, Walker has also laid a solid foundation for her own literary reputation. Eleven African-American scholars have contributed their appraisals of this "common bond," concentrating on parallels between Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Walker's The Color Purple; and Walker's tribute to Hurston, "Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View," is reprinted. ... Read more

Product Description
Word count: 6295. ... Read more