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.

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...

Challenges the prevailing notion that the work of all American writers reflects a sense of determined individualism.

"Domhnall Mitchell begins by focusing on three historical phenomena - the railroad, the Dickinson Homestead, and horticulture - and argues that poems about trains, home, and flowers engage with their meanings in ways that extend beyond the confines of the aesthetic. He shows how Dickinson's poems and letters reveal the full complexity of her position as a woman situated within a larger social and economic class."--Jacket.

Ten original essays by advanced scholars and well-published poets address the middle generation of American poets, including the familiar--Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, and John Berryman--and various important contemporaries: Delmore Schwartz, Theodore Roethke, Robert Hayden, and Lorine Niedecker. This was a famously troubled cohort of writers, for reasons both personal and cultural, and collectively their poems give us powerful,...

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...