New social orders: reconceptualising family and community in utopian fiction

A study focusing on family and community as they are represented in seven utopian/dystopian fictions written for children and young adults by Australian, American, Canadian, and British writers is illustrated. These novels depict reflections of how various notions of new social orders have impacted on children's literature and how this affects the utopian/dystopian strain, present in children's literature.

Where did all these books come from? The Publishing Industry and American Intellectual Life

The American book publishing industry shapes the character of American intellectual life. While the newspaper and television industries have been accused of and investigated for bias and lowering America’s intellectual standards, book publishing has gone largely unexamined by scholars. The existing studies of the publishing industry have focused on finance, procedure and history. “There are few ‘theories’ of publishing – efforts to understand the ‘whys’ as well as the ‘hows.’ Few scholarly scientists have devoted significant scholarly attention to publishing” (Altbach and Hoshino, xiii). There are many possible reasons for this lacuna. First, there is a perception that books have always been around, that they are an “old” technology and therefore they don’t appear to have had as much of an impact on our society as television and other media (which were developed quickly and suddenly) seem to have had (Altbach and Hoshino, xiv). Also, despite books’ present and past popularity, television, radio, and now the internet reach more people more easily, and are therefore more topical points of study and observation. In studying the effects of mass media on everyday American life, television and the internet may be the most logical points of study. Regarding public intellectual life however, books play a much more important role. Public intellectual life has always been associated with independent thinkers publishing their work for the masses. For this reason, this I focus on trade publishing. Trade publishing produces fiction and non-fiction works for the general reading public, as opposed to technical manuals, textbooks, and other fiction and nonfiction books targeted to small and specific audiences. Although, quantitatively speaking, “the largest part of book publishing business is embodied in that great complex of companies and activities producing educational, business, scientific, technical, and reference books and materials,” (Tebbel 1987, 439) the trade industry publishes most of the books that most people read. It is the most public segment of the industry, and the most likely place to find public intellectualism. Trade publishing is not only the most public segment of the industry, but it is also the most susceptible to corruption and lowered intellectual standards. Unlike specialty publishing, which caters to a specific, known segment of society, trade publishers must compete with countless other publications, as well as with other forms of media, for the patronage of the general public. As John Tebbel (author of a widely referenced history of the publishing industry) puts it, “The textbook, scientific, or technical book is subjected to much more rigorous scrutiny by buyers and users, and in an intensively competitive market inferior products are quickly lost" (Tebbel 1987, xiv). Since the standards for trade publishing are not nearly as specific – trade books simply need to catch the attention of a significant number of readers, they don’t have to measure up to a given level of quality – the quality of trade books is much more variable. And yet, a successful trade publication can have a much greater impact on society than the most rigorously researched and edited textbook or scholarly study.

Exploring Magic Realism in Salman Rushdie's Fiction

Kluwick breaks new ground in this book, moving away from Rushdie studies that focus on his status as postcolonial or postmodern, and instead considering the significance of magic realism in his fiction. Rushdie’s magic realism, in fact, lies at the heart of his engagement with the post/colonial. In a departure from conventional descriptions of magic realism—based primarily on the Latin-American tradition—Kluwick here proposes an alternative definition, allowing for a more accurate description of the form. She argues that it is disharmony, rather than harmony, that is decisive: that the incompatibility of the realist and the supernatural needs to be recognized as a driving force in Rushdie’s fiction. In its rigorous analysis of this Rushdian magic realism, this book considers the entire corpus—Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Shalimar the Clown, and The Enchantress of Florence. This study is the first of its kind to do so.

Melodrama and Narrative Fiction: Towards a Typology

Recent research on melodrama has stressed its versatility and ubiquity by approaching it as a mode of expression rather than a theatrical genre. A variety of contexts in which melodrama is at work have been explored, but only little scholarly attention has been paid to the relationship between melodrama and novels, short stories and novellas. This article proposes a typology of melodrama in narrative prose fiction, examining four different categories: Melodrama and Sentimentalism, Depiction of Melodramatic Performances in Narrative Prose Fiction, Theatrical Antics and Aesthetics in Narrative Prose Fiction and Meta-Melodrama. Its aim is to clarify the ways in which melodrama, ever since its early days on the stages of late eighteenth-century Europe, has interacted with fictional prose narratives, thereby shaping the literary imagination in the Anglophone world.

Rotten Symbol Mongering: Scapegoating in Post-9/11 American War Literature

A rhetorical approach to the fiction of war offers an appropriate vehicle by which one may encounter and interrogate such literature and the cultural metanarratives that exist therein. My project is a critical analysis—one that relies heavily upon Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic method and his concepts of scapegoating, the comic corrective, and hierarchical psychosis—of three war novels published in 2012 (The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers, FOBBIT by David Abrams, and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain). This analysis assumes a rhetorical screen in order to subvert and redirect the grand narratives the United States perpetuates in art form whenever it goes to war. Kenneth Burke’s concept of ad bellum purificandum (the purification of war) sought to bridge the gap between war experience and the discourse that it creates in both art and criticism. My work extends that project. I examine the symbolic incongruity of convenient symbols that migrate from war to war (“Geronimo” was used as code for Osama bin Laden’s death during the S.E.A.L team raid; “Indian Country” stands for any dangerous land in Iraq; hajji is this generation’s epithet for the enemy other). Such an examination can weaken our cultural “symbol mongering,” to borrow a phrase from Walker Percy. These three books, examined according to Burke’s methodology, exhibit a wide range of approaches to the soldier’s tale. Notably, however, whether they refigure the grand narratives of modern culture or recast the common redemptive war narrative into more complex representations, this examination shows how one can grasp, contend, and transcend the metanarrative of the typical, redemptive war story.

Vocations in biography and fiction; an annotated list of books for young people.

First published in 1953 under title: Vocations in fact and fiction.

American literature 1607-1885 /

Photocopy. Ann Arbor, Mich. : University Microfilms, 1964. -- 20 cm.

Syllabus of a course of six lectures on prose fiction in America ...

I. The art of fiction.--II. Washington Irving.--III. James Fennimore Cooper.--IV. Hawthorne and Poe.--V. The realistic movement.--VI. Later tendencies.

Stories by American authors.

v. 6. The village convict, by C. H. White. The Denver express, by A. A. Hayes. The misfortunes of Bro' Thomas Wheatley, by Lina R. Fairfax. The heartbreak cameo, by L. W. Champney. Miss Eunice's glove, by A. Webster. Brother Sebastian's friendship, by H. Frederic.--v. 7. The bishop's vagabond, by Octave Thanet. Lost, by E. Bellamy. Kirby's coals of fire, by Louise Stockton. Passages from the journal of a social wreck, by Margaret Floyd. Stella Grayland, by J. T. McKay. The image of San Donato, by Virginia W. Johnson.--v. 8. The brigade commander, by J. W. De Forest. Split zephyr, by H. A. Beers. Zerviah Hope, by Elizabeth S. Phelps. The life-magnet, by A. A. Adee. Osgood's predicament, by Elizabeth D. B. Stoddard.--v. 9. Marse Chan, by T. N. Page. Mr. Bixby's Christmas visitor, by C. S. Gage. Eli, by C. H. White. Young Strong of "The Clarion," by Milicent W. Shinn. How old Wiggins wore ship, by Captain R. T. Coffin. "--mas has come," by L. Kip.--v. 10. Pancha, by T. A. Janvier. The ablest man in the world, by E. P. Mitchell. Young Moll's peevy, by C. A. Stephens. Manmat'ha, by C. De Kay. A daring fiction, by H. H. Boyesen. The story of two lives, by Julia Schayer.

The South in the building of the nation; a history of the southern states designed to record the South's part in the making of the American nation; to portray the character and genius, to chronicle the achievements and progress and to illustrate the life and traditions of the southern people ...

Vols. 1-4, 7-12, 1909; v. 5-6, 1910; v. 13, 1913.

Replacement list of fiction, with selected list of recommended series and suggested specifications for book manufacture,

Mode of access: Internet.

Impure Memory, Imperfect Justice: A Comparison of Post-Repression Fiction Across the South Atlantic

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-06