San Antonio College Library

Marilyn Butler places the Romantics into their proper historical setting. She relates the events and developments of the time--the French and American Revolutions, the Napoleonic Wars, the expansion of agriculture, trade, and industry, growing economic and social pressures--to the cultural forces which shaped these writers. She reveals common factors which engaged the separate efforts of so many truly individual creative minds, and the fierce personal...

Concisely told and full of fascinating detail, The Birth of the Beat Generation chronicles the life and times of the maverick poets and novelists William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac, as well as the San Francisco group, which included Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder. It also evokes the figures surrounding them, including Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Herbert Huncke, and Peter Orlovsky. This is the first book to link the Beats to...

"The Gothic novel emerged out of the romantic mist alongside a new conception of the home as a separate sphere for women. Looking at novels from Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Kate Ferguson Ellis investigates the relationship between these two phenomena of middle-class culture - the idealization of the home and the popularity of the Gothic - and explores how both male and female authors used the Gothic novel to...

"In an innovative rereading of American radical politics and culture of the 1950s and 1960s, Martinez uncovers reactionary, neoromantic, and sometimes racist strains in the Beats' vision of freedom, and he brings to the fore the complex stances of Latinos on participant democracy and progressive culture. He analyzes the ways the Beats, Chicanos, and migrant writers conceived of and articulated social and political perspectives. He contends that both...