Bücher der Reihe Studies in Major Literary Authors

Examines the representations of homosexuality and homoeroticism in Joseph Conrad's fiction. This book traces Conrad's representations of homosexuality and homoeroticism, beginning with the Malay works and ending with "The Shadow Line".

This book traces Stoddard's emergence as a writer in the 1850s, her conflict-ridden relationships with the writers associated with the genteel tradition, and her efforts to negotiate the boundaries of Victorian culture in the USA.

An overview of McCarthy's published work and includes: the short stories he published as a student, his novels, stage play and TV film script. This book locates him as a icocolastic writer, engaged in deconstructing America's vision of itself as a nation with an exceptionalist role in the world. It also outlines his personal background.

Presents an ecocritical reading of DeLillo's novels in an attempt to mediate between the seemingly incompatible influences of postmodernism and environmentalism. This title argues that although DeLillo is responding to and engaging with a postmodern culture of simulacra, his novels do not reflect a postmodernist theory of the "end of nature."

Examines a selection of G K Chesterton's novels, poetry, and literary criticism and outlines the distinctive philosophy of history that emerges from these writings. This book concludes that Chesterton's emphasis on locality is the hallmark of his historical philosophy in that it blends the concepts of free will, specificity, and creatureliness.

Analyzes the relationship between race and genre in four of Toni Morrison's novels: "The Bluest Eye", "Tar Baby", "Jazz", and "Beloved". This book argues how Morrison's novels revise conventional generic forms such as bildungsroman, folktales, slave narratives, and the formal realism of the novel itself.

Examines Charles Dickens' weekly family magazine "Household Words" in order to develop a picture of how the journal negotiated, asserted and simultaneously deconstructed Englishness as a unified (and sometimes unifying) mode of expression.

Examines the conflict of aesthetics and politics in "The Diary of Virginia Woolf". As a modernist writer concerned with contemporary aesthetic theories, Woolf experimented with limiting the representative nature of writing. At the same time, as a feminist, Woolf wanted to incorporate her political interests in her fiction.

Examining the ways F Scott Fitzgerald portrayed spectator sports as working to help structure ideologies of class, community and nationhood, this book shows how narratives of attending sports and being a 'fan' cultivate communities of spectatorship.

Presents interpretations of Cormac McCarthy's characters as simple, antinomian, and non-psychological; and of his landscapes as unrelated to the violent arcs of often orphaned and socially detached characters. This book talks about how McCarthy's books only appear to be stories of masculine heroics, and expressions of misogynistic fear.

Examining how Crane's corporeal aesthetic informs poems written across the span of his career, this book focuses on four texts in which Crane's preoccupation with the body reaches its apoge.

Reevaluates the achievement of James Merrill, by showing how he takes up an old paradigm - innocence - and reinvents it in response to new historical, scientific, and cultural developments including the bomb, contemporary cosmology, and the question of agency. The book covers Merrill's full career, emphasizing on his late poetry.

Thomas Pynchon's writing of postmodern fiction has been characterized as genre-defying and enigmatic, and as a series of complex and esoteric language games. This study attempts to demonstrate, however, that an oblique yet compelling sense of the "political" Pynchon disappears all too easily under the mantle of post modernity.