San Antonio College Library

Pifer contends that Bellow's fiction is fundamentally radical. Going against the grain of contemporary culture and its secular pieties, he undermines accepted notions of reality and challenges the "orthodoxies" created by materialist values and rationalist thought. Charged by his belief in the soul, his 10 novels test the assumptions of traditional realism. Pifer stresses the importance to Bellow of the invisible world, the longing for revelation,...

An examination of the critics' contradictory opinions about the novelist and Mrs. Lyde's own evaluation of her work.

William Dean Howells constitutes a curious case in American literature, and that literature, like any national literature if closely examined, has a good many curious cases. Howells's curious place is that of an author whose presence loomed very large during most of his lifetime and who was quickly forgotten after his death. Every literature has its popular successes whose names are forgotten within a generation or less. Yet, there are differences...

A critical and sympathetic examination of the total literary and cultural significance of Harriet Beecher Stowe, a legend in her own time, who not only championed the abolition of slavery but also women's rights, the protection of children against exploitation, and the temperance movement.

White Liberal Identity, Literary Pedagogy, and Classic American Realism brings literary works from the turn of the last century face to face with some of the dilemmas and paradoxes that currently define white liberal identity in the United States. Phillip Barrish develops fresh analytic and pedagogical tools for probing contemporary white liberalism, while also offering new critical insights and classroom approaches to American literary realism. New...