Willa Cather's last novel set on the Great Plains,Lucy Gayheart, depicts a temperamental young woman, pianist Lucy Gayheart. In writing the novel, Cather drew on her lifelong interest in music, which ...plays an integral role in the book. The novel received very mixed responses among critics and reviewers after its 1935 publication.
Willa Cather's penultimate novel tells the story of young Lucy Gayheart from Haverford, Nebraska who escapes life in a small town around the turn of the century to pursue a career in music. In Chicago, she attracts the attention of an aging but charismatic singer, Clement Sebastian, and comes to the discovery that she was not born to be an artist. What follows is a tale of love and loss.
The Willa Cather Scholarly Edition includes a historical essay providing fresh insight into the novel and Cather's writing process, photographs and maps, and explanatory notes providing a full range of biographical and historical information. The novel, edited according to standards set by the Committee on Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association, presents a clean, authoritative text of the first edition.
The Gothic Novel in Ireland, 1760-1830 reveals how the Irish contribution to the rise of the gothic novel is all too frequently overlooked. Irish writers were actively engaged in shaping the form now ...conventionally understood as beginning with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). Obviously an important text in the evolution of the gothic mode, the ostensibly pioneering Castle of Otranto was actually preceded by two Irish novels: Thomas Leland’s Longsword (1762) and The Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley (1760), by ‘A Young Lady’. Neither of these texts overshadows Walpole’s, but their omission from the literary history of the British gothic novel is nevertheless a telling indication of the exclusionary nature of current scholarly perspectives. Christina Morin’s adroit and percipient text reveals how the Gothic was very much an international genre.
The slave experience was a defining one in American history, and not surprisingly, has been a significant and powerful trope in African American literature. In Re-Forming the Past, A. Timothy ...Spaulding examines contemporary revisions of slave narratives that use elements of the fantastic to redefine the historical and literary constructions of American slavery. In their rejection of mimetic representation and traditional historiography, postmodern slave narratives such as Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Charles Johnson’s Ox Herding Tale and Middle Passage, Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, and Samuel Delaney’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand set out to counter the usual slave narrative’s reliance on realism and objectivity by creating alternative histories based on subjective, fantastic, and non-realistic representations of slavery. As these texts critique traditional conceptions of history, identity, and aesthetic form, they simultaneously re-invest these concepts with a political agency that harkens back to the original project of the 19th-century slave narratives. In their rejection of mimetic representation and traditional historiography, Spaulding contextualizes postmodern slave narrative. By addressing both literary and popular African American texts, Re-Forming the Past expands discussions of both the African American literary tradition and postmodern culture.
Reading Digital Fiction offers the first comprehensive and systematic theoretical, methodological, and analytical examination of digital fiction from a cognitive and empirical perspective. Proposing ...the new concept of "medial reading", it argues for the centrality of an audience's interest in, awareness of and/or attention to the medium in which a text is produced and received, and which we argue should be applied to reader data across media. The book analyses and theorises five generations of digital fiction and their reading, including hypertext fiction, hypermedia fiction, narrative video games, app fiction, and virtual reality. It showcases medium- and platform-specific methods of qualitative reader response research across a variety of contexts and settings from screen-based and embodied interaction to gallery installation, and from reading group and individual interview to think-aloud methodologies. The book thus addresses the unique affordances of digital fiction reading by designing and reporting on new empirical studies focusing on hypertextuality, interactivity, immersion, medium-specific forms of textual "you", ontological ambiguity, reader orientation, and empathy. In so doing, the book refines, critiques, and expands cognitive, transmedial, and empirical narratology and stylistics by placing the reader of these new narratives front and centre.
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