San Antonio College Library

Discusses fiction in which the arrival of a "mysterious stranger" affects the community, focusing on such works as Mark Twain's Mystersious Stranger, William Faulkner's Spotted Horses, and Flannery O'Connor's The Displaced Person.

The essays in this collection offer readers vivid and varied evidence of the female response to recurring attempts by culture to artificially limit identity along the gendered lines of private and public experience. Calling on voices both familiar and little-known, British and American, black and white, young and old, poor and rich, heterosexual and lesbian, the essayists explore how women within unique personal and historical conditions used life-writing...

Simon Gatrell offers a fresh and stimulating exploration of Hardy's account in fiction of the individual man or woman's relationship with various aspects of the encompassing world - with other men and women, with the aggregation known as society, with the natural and artificial environment, and with the supernatural. He focuses on the importance of community in Hardy's fiction, especially on the ability of rural villages and towns to withstand the...

"In this book, Philip Joseph considers how regional literature can remain relevant in a modern global community. Why, he asks, should we continue to read regionalist fiction in an age of expanding international communications and increasing nonlocal forms of affiliation? With this question as a guide, Joseph places the regionalist tradition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at the center of a contemporary conservation about community."--Jacket....

"As the last collection of Cleanth Brooks's essays before his death, Community, Religion, and Literature represents his final, considered views on the reading of literature and the role it plays in our society. He argues that the proper and essential role of literature lies in giving us our sense of community. Yet he denounces the extent to which literature, too, is now being usurped by the critics who see writing as pure language. He believes that...

This book examines the intersection between courtesy and understanding in works by Berkeley, Pope, Sterne, Johnson, and Boswell. It shows how each of these writers represents a conversational environment in which men and women, discussing general concerns on an equal footing, were able to achieve what the age described as "common sense." In one of his Idlers, Johnson indicated the problems involved in such an achievement as follows: "As a question...

"Risking Differences revisions the dynamics of multicultural feminist community by exploring the ways that identification creates misrecognitions and misunderstandings between individuals and within communities. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Jean Wyatt argues not only that individual psychic processes of identification influence social dynamics, but also that social discourses of race, class, and culture shape individual identifications. In...