Set near the source of the Amazon River in the Peruvian Andes, Matthiessen’s novel begins in the last outpost of civilization, a ramshackle mission town. Here, the missionaries Leslie and Andy Hube…| Literary Theory and Criticism
20 posts published by NASRULLAH MAMBROL during May 2025| Literary Theory and Criticism
4 posts published by NASRULLAH MAMBROL during August 2025| Literary Theory and Criticism
Who is John Galt? This question opens Ayn Rand’s acclaimed novel Atlas Shrugged. At first just a joke, this query begins a serious investigation on the part of protagonist Dagny Taggart to discover the identity of this man. She discovers... Read More ›| Literary Theory and Criticism
In World of Light, a 1979 documentary featuring May Sarton, the author frankly discusses many pressing concerns: attitudes toward the aged in the United States, being true to oneself, writing as self-realization, passionate relationships between women (sexual or otherwise), and... Read More ›| Literary Theory and Criticism
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner’s fifth novel, is the third set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and the first that identifies Yoknapatawpha County by name. The novel was written immediately after—although published before—Sanctuary, the sensational “potboiler” Faulkner had... Read More ›| Literary Theory and Criticism
Arrowsmith was one of five major novels that Sinclair Lewis wrote in the 1920s and the one for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. It was turned into a popular movie in 1931 starring Ronald Co…| Literary Theory and Criticism
John O’Hara derived the title of his first novel from W. Somerset Maugham’s 1933 play Sheppey, which features Death glibly describing the fate of a man who had tried to elude her: “I was astonished to see him in Baghdad,... Read More ›| Literary Theory and Criticism
This novel diverts the saga started in Love Medicine with the Morriseys, Lamartines, and Kashpaws by introducing new families and therefore, different realities and conflicts. For the difficulties resulting from assimilation conflicts and annihilation present in Erdrich’s earlier novels, Erdrich... Read More ›| Literary Theory and Criticism
Often overshadowed by The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), William Dean Howells’s Annie Kilburn (1888) is an important novel for understanding Howells’s development …| Literary Theory and Criticism
In this autobiographical bildungsroman set in the colonial Antigua of Jamaica Kincaid’s own childhood, adolescence is figured as loss: loss of the protagonist’s irreplaceable bond with her mother, …| Literary Theory and Criticism
20 posts published by NASRULLAH MAMBROL during July 2025| Literary Theory and Criticism
Angle of Repose, for which Wallace Stegner won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972, was written from 1968 to 1970, a turbulent period in U.S. history. Without directly discussing the Vietnam War, the cause for much of the turbulence, Stegner addresses... Read More ›| Literary Theory and Criticism
Literary naturalists, such as Theodore Dreiser, often depicted characters in urban, working-class settings. A scathing indictment of the American success myth, An American Tragedy describes two unequal Americas in unceasing struggle. The poor suffer, while the rich insist “how difficult... Read More ›| Literary Theory and Criticism
A New York Times 2001 Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2001, American Son presents a grim view of immigrant status and violence in Southern California in the 1990s. This coming-of-age novel tells... Read More ›| Literary Theory and Criticism
Ellis’s first-person account of Patrick Bateman, a Wall Street type who kills between binges of good grooming, was a scandal even before its publication because its first contracted publisher refused to print it. Its horrific, some would say pornographic, depiction... Read More ›| Literary Theory and Criticism
Although it was written first, Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize–winning American Pastoral is chronologically the second novel in his American Trilogy about postwar America, beginning with I Married a Communist (1998) and ending with The Human Stain (2000). Covering the period... Read More ›| Literary Theory and Criticism
When Norman Mailer released his serialized novel An American Dream in 1965, critics either praised him for his work or dismissed the novel as a failure. In this controversial novel, Mailer tells the story of Stephen Richards Rojack, a former... Read More ›| Literary Theory and Criticism
Bapsi Sidhwa, a Parsee (Zoroastrian) writer of Pakistani descent, was born in Karachi, then part of pre-partition India, and all her early fiction is set in Pakistan or India. She immigrated to the United States in the 1980s, and An... Read More ›| Literary Theory and Criticism
Before the film American Beauty, before Columbine, even before the Menendez brothers or JonBenet Ramsey became symbols of American suburban culture, Joyce Carol Oates had, in her fluid style, already shown the “dark side” of suburbia in American Appetites. Indeed,... Read More ›| Literary Theory and Criticism
Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, first published in 1943 and then in 1946, details the memories and experiences of a young immigrant from the Philippines. Bulosan’s travel narrative recounts the difficulties of his childhood in provincial Philippines, the... Read More ›| Literary Theory and Criticism
Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel focuses on Josef (Joe) Kavalier and Sammy Clay (né Klayman), two artistically gifted cousins who create the masked comic-book hero, The Escapist, modeled on Superman, in New York City just before, during, and after World... Read More ›| Literary Theory and Criticism
The publication of All the Pretty Horses in 1992 vaulted Cormac McCarthy into the spotlight of the American literary mainstream. Though his five previous novels had garnered consistently positive reviews and a number of awards, McCarthy had endured poor sales... Read More ›| Literary Theory and Criticism
America’s first poet laureate, Robert Penn Warren, was best known during his life as a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet. However, his 1946 novel, All the King’s Men, has become his most recognized work since his death in 1987. The novel won... Read More ›| Literary Theory and Criticism
Almost every scholar of Asian American literature has acknowledged the brilliance of Milton Murayama’s first novel, All I Asking for Is My Body, and its notable contribution to local Hawaiian and Asian American literature. When All I Asking for Is... Read More ›| Literary Theory and Criticism
Although this book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, Booth Tarkington’s works remain on very few academic lists today. However, Booth Tarkington, born in Indianapolis in 1869, was quite popular during his lifetime. The Princeton-educated author lived more similarly to... Read More ›| Literary Theory and Criticism
A central but underappreciated figure in the emergence of American national literature, Royall Tyler (1757–1826) is probably best known for his nationalistic play The Contrast (1787), a fairly conventional comedy of manners distinguishing Yankee virtue from English vice. From a... Read More ›| Literary Theory and Criticism
Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence continues to invite a wide range of analyses. The novel examines the triangle between Ellen Olenska, her cousin May Welland, and May’s husband, Newland Archer, against the background of upper-class society in 1870s New... Read More ›| Literary Theory and Criticism
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876. The novel was Clemens’s sixth book, but only his second novel: Clemens’s earlier books were two collections of …| Literary Theory and Criticism
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) began writing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1876, immediately after he completed The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Mightily attracted to the character of Huck,…| Literary Theory and Criticism
Saul Bellow’s third novel and winner of the National Book Award, The Adventures of Augie March, came easily to him. Indeed, says Bellow, he began the novel in Paris, writing in trains and in cafés,…| Literary Theory and Criticism
The Accidental Tourist (1985), Anne Tyler’s 10th novel, won the 1985 National Book Critics Circle Award for the most distinguished work of American fiction and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.…| Literary Theory and Criticism
Enrique González Martínez’s Wring the Swan’s Neck Wring the swan’s neck who with deceiving plumage inscribes his whiteness on the azure stream; he merely vaunts his grace and nothing fe…| Literary Theory and Criticism
5 posts published by NASRULLAH MAMBROL during February 2024| Literary Theory and Criticism
The story of the events that led Mary Shelley to write her Frankenstein story is now almost as well known as the plot itself. The tale began to take shape in 1816 as a result of ghost-story-telling…| Literary Theory and Criticism
First published in The Cornhill Magazine from January 1860 through April 1861, Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage was the fourth in his Barsetshire novels sequence. That sequence had opened in 18…| Literary Theory and Criticism
Marmion Savage’s first novel, The Falcon Family; or, Young Ireland, satirized parasitic socialites, traditionalists within the Church of England, and the Young Ireland Party, a group of extremists …| Literary Theory and Criticism
George Moore’s melodramatic romance novel Evelyn Innes is replete with characters based on real people. The author fashioned Evelyn’s father after the French-born musician Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–19…| Literary Theory and Criticism
Fanny Burney published her first work, Evelina, anonymously, basing it on a piece of juvenilia titled The History of Caroline Evelyn, which she had destroyed on the advice of her stepmother. As an …| Literary Theory and Criticism
The third in his sequence of Palliser novels, The Eustace Diamonds represents one of Anthony Trollope’s darkest tales. He departs from his gently ironic presentations of everyday human relationship…| Literary Theory and Criticism
George Meredith indulged himself with a comedic presentation in his 1879 novel, The Egoist: A Comedy in Narrative. It allowed him to engage in his favored approach of satirizing bourgeois stupidity…| Literary Theory and Criticism
East Lynne represents prototypical 19th-century sensation fiction, extremely popular with English readers. The novel was the second for Mrs. Henry (Ellen Price) Wood, who had begun publishing highl…| Literary Theory and Criticism
A fiction subgenre of a realistic nature that focuses on the home scene, domestic realism evolved from the reaction against Romanticism that occurred in the mid-19th century. Following the preoccup…| Literary Theory and Criticism
Over the past two decades, Print Culture Studies has gained increasing attention, particularly from scholars disillusioned by what they perceived as the abstract complexity of theoretical discourse…| Literary Theory and Criticism
Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus introduced the concept of “surface reading,” a reading practice focused on what a text plainly presents, aiming to understand the text “at face valu…| Literary Theory and Criticism
Tahar Ben Jelloun in The Sacred Night depicts Moroccan society and rails against social injustice, sexual and religious hypocrisy, gender inequalities, patriarchy, and women’s oppression. He convey…| Literary Theory and Criticism
The River Between is the first novel, though the second published work, by author Ngugi wa Thiong’o. The book represents a foray into the complex exploration of intracultural Gikuyu struggle expres…| Literary Theory and Criticism
The Return of Philip Latinovicz is the major fictional work of the Croatian novelist, playwright, poet, and essayist Miroslav Krleža (1893– 1981). Krleža, who was to become a preeminent cultural an…| Literary Theory and Criticism
Originally published in French, The Radiance of the King is the most famous novel of Camara Laye (1928–80), whose name is sometimes listed as Laye Camara. In contrast with a number of early African…| Literary Theory and Criticism
The Radetzky March, first published in Berlin in 1932, is regarded as the most significant novel by Joseph Roth (1894–1939) and the work that clearly defines the author’s public image as a Hapsburg…| Literary Theory and Criticism
Rachid Boudjedra (1941– ) began writing in the 1960s, a period during which the Algerian novel in French shifted from a critique of colonialism to a questioning of social, political, and religious …| Literary Theory and Criticism
One of the most significant cultural currents in the mid- to late 19th century was an increasing interest in defining national characteristics as part of the development of nationalism. In the Czec…| Literary Theory and Criticism
In his article ‘Literature as Supermarket: Mapping World Literature Today’, P. P. Raveendran reviews the genealogy of the concept of ‘World Literature’ to bring out the theoretical underpinnings o…| Literary Theory and Criticism
Terry Eagleton’s exploration of the definition of literature in his introduction to “What is Literature?” presents a multifaceted inquiry into the nature of literary discourse. Ea…| Literary Theory and Criticism
Stephen Greenblatt is an American Literary critic. Greenblatt is one of the founders of New Historicism which is also known as cultural poetics. While he was teaching at the University of Californi…| Literary Theory and Criticism
The Prophet, by the Lebanese-American author Khalil Gibran, occupies a peculiar place in 20th-century world literature. The Prophet has been translated into more than 100 languages, making it one o…| Literary Theory and Criticism
The most popular novel by Nobel Prize winner Miguel Ángel Asturias Rosales (1899–1974), The President is a classic of Latin American literature. The novel examines the political phenomenon of dicta…| Literary Theory and Criticism
The Plague was written by Albert Camus (1913–60), one of the most gifted and influential writers and philosophers in the French language of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in liter…| Literary Theory and Criticism
