Value and vision in American literature : literary essays in honor of Ray Lewis White / edited by Joseph Candido.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Candido, Joseph, 1945-

White, Ray Lewis.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--History and criticism.

American literature.

Genre:

Festschriften.

Physical Description:

xviii, 280 pages ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Athens : Ohio University Press, [1999]

Summary:

The widely divergent voices in this collection are united by their common interest in the American literary heritage and by their intention to redefine that heritage by altering our angle of vision or forcing us to re-examine some traditional values.

Unabashedly eclectic in methodology, subject matter, and technique, the essays collected in Value and Vision in American Literature nonetheless share a common intention to recover the neglected, reassess the familiar, or challenge the orthodox.

Through their various (and sometimes contrasting) critical points of view, these essays call attention to ideas or connections that demand a reappraisal of conventional attitudes or ingrained responses. Ranging in focus from the period of the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, they treat indisputably canonical figures such as Hawthorne, Faulkner, James, Hemingway, Cather, Bellow, Porter, Welty, and Warren in the same breath -- and often refreshingly on the same terms -- with Wallace Stegner, Cormac McCarthy, Dunstan Thompson, neglected Civil War poets, and the New Formalist critics of the last ten years.

In celebration and in reflection of the important critical contribution Ray Lewis White has made to the study of American literature, these writers, each a noted scholar in the field of literary studies, present a picture of American literature that manages to value the past at the same time that it asks us to envision that past anew.

Contents:

Foreword: Ray Lewis White: A Tribute / Charles H. Adams vii

Chapter 1 A View fom the Dig at Century's End / Michael Reynolds 1

Chapter 2 The Politics of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" / Keneth Kinnamon 15

Chapter 3 Wallace Stegner: Artist as Environmentalist / Jackson J. Benson 32

Chapter 4 "The VaNe Sisters" and Nabokov's "subtle and loving" Readers / Linda Wagner-Martin 47

Chapter 5 Morality and Its Alternative: The Damnation of Theron Ware / Brian Wilkie 64

Chapter 6 Lessons of the Bear / Robert Cochran 83

Chapter 7 Hawthorne's "Mad, Merry Stream of Human Life": The Roman Carnival as Apocalypse in The Marble Faun / David B. Kesterson 95

Chapter 8 El Otro Sud: Willa Cather and Cormac McCarthy / Ann Fisher-Wirth 115

Chapter 9 Welty and Faulkner and the Southern Literary Tradition / Noel Polk 132

Chapter 10 Pragmatic Humanism in The Ambassadors and Absalom, Absalom!: A Philosophical Link between James and Faulkner / John Caldwell Guilds 151

Chapter 11 Revolution Has Not Yet Entered Their Souls: The Jilting of Katherine Anne Porter / Susan Swartwout 168

Chapter 12 Poems of the Civil War, Past and Present / Stephen Cushman 180

Chapter 13 "My Young Man of Mars": The Gay, World War II Love Poetry of Dunstan Thompson / Jim Elledge 202

Chapter 14 Warren's Ventriloquist: J.J. Audubon / Dave Smith 218

Chapter 15 Stephen Dedalus and the New Formalism / Sidney Burris 238

A Bibliography of the Writings of Ray Lewis White 261.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Bibliography of the writings of Ray Lewis White": pages 261-266.

ISBN:

0821412914

OCLC:

41256431