Описание: Traditionally, the critical reputation of Nobel Prize-winning American novelist John Steinbeck (1902-1968) has rested on his achievements of the 1930s, especially In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), The Long Valley (1938), and, of course, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), one of the most powerful – and arguable on of the greatest – American novels of this century.
Book reviewers and academic critics often turned antagonistic toward Steinbeck when he no longer produced work with the sweeping reach and social consciousness of The Grapes of Wrath. He was accused of selling out, or co-opting his talent, when in fact the inordinate public success of Grapes and especially its attendant notoriety had caused a backlash for Steinbeck. As a result he became self-conscious about his own ability, and suspicious of that \u201cclumsy vehicle,\u201d the novel. The very act of researching and writing Grapes, which occupied him fully for several years and which he had already conceived as his final book on proletarian themes, changed him drastically.
No longer willing to be the chronicler of Depression-era subjects, Steinbeck went afield to find new roots, new sources, new forms. For example, in the six years following the publication of Grapes, Steinbeck completed a suit of love poems; a full-length novel (bastardized by Alfred Hitchcock in his 1943 film, Lifeboat); a nonfiction scientific book, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (with Edward F. Ricketts); a documentary film, The Forgotten Village; a documentary book to help the war effort, Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team; a series of articles he wrote as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune (later collected as Once There Was a War); and two novels, The Moon Is Down and Cannery Row.
Steinbeck came to define himself less as a novelist and more as a man of letters, a restless experimenter with form and subject matter, and a prophetic postmodernist whose key subject for the rest of his career was the dilemma of individual choice and ethical consciousness. Thus, Steinbeck’s later fiction, from The Moon Is Down (1942) through The Winter of Our Discontent (1962), and his later nonfiction, from Sea of Cortez (1941) through Travels with Charley (1962) and America and Americans (1966), often shows a different set of stylistic, thematic, and philosophical bearings from his earlier work and underscores his dramatic shift toward \u201cindividual thinking.\u201d A full appreciation of Steinbeck’s mid-career metamorphosis and, consequently, of his later achievement requires a corresponding shift in critical approach – a departure from the traditional New Critical norms. Instead of marginalizing these works, all the contributors to this volume agree that Steinbeck’s later publications merit – indeed, demand – closer scrutiny.
Written especially for this collection in honor of Professor Tetsumaro Hayashi, the distinguished founder and editor-in-chief of the Steinbeck Quarterly, on his retirement from Ball State University and his move to Kwassui Women’s College in Nagasaki, Japan, these essays explore new ways of addressing Steinbeck’s later work and career, and include forays into subjects as diverse as ethnicity and music. They range from treatment of his post-structuralist use of language in Sea of Cortez and his involvement as a speech writer for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s reelection bid in 1944 to the influence of Charles Darwin’s theories of sexual selection in The Wayward Bus, his revision of the myth of Cain in The Winter of Our Discontent, and his employment of Arthurian quest values in his last book, America and Americans.
For this group of critics – which includes respected veteran Steinbeck scholars Robert DeMott, John Ditsky, Mimi Gladstein, Cliff Lewis, Robert Morsberger, Susan Shillinglaw, and Roy Simmonds, as well as talented new voices Debra Barker
The Grapes of Wrath is generally considered Steinbeck’s masterpiece, but the short novel was the form he most frequently turned to and most consciously theorized about, and with constant experimentation he made the form his own. Much of the best—and the worst—of his writing appears in his short novels. This collection reviews what has been categorized as the “good” and the “bad,” looking beyond the careless labeling that has characterized a great deal of the commentary on Steinbeck’s writing to the true strengths and weaknesses of the works. The contributors demonstrate that even in the short novels that are most often criticized, there is more depth and sophistication than has generally been acknowledged. The essays examine the six most popular short novels—Tortilla Flat, The Red Pony, Of Mice and Men, The Moon Is Down, Cannery Row, and The Pearl—in addition to the three usually thought of as less successful—Burning Bright, Sweet Thursday, and The Short Reign of Pippin IV. Because most of Steinbeck’s short novels were adapted and presented as plays or screenplays, many of the essays deal with dramatic or film versions of the short novels as well as with the fiction. The collection concludes with a comprehensive checklist of criticism of the short novels.
Contributors. Richard Astro, Jackson J. Benson, Carroll Britch, John Ditsky, Joseph Fontenrose, Warren French, Robert Gentry, Mimi Reisel Gladstein, William Goldhurst, Tetsumaro Hayashi, Robert S. Hughes Jr., Howard Levant, Clifford Lewis, Peter Lisca, Anne Loftis, Charles R. Metzger, Michael J. Meyer, Robert E. Morsberger, Louis Owens, Roy S. Simmonds, Mark Spilka, John Timmerman
Автор: Gavin Jones Название: Reclaiming John Steinbeck ISBN: 110884412X ISBN-13(EAN): 9781108844123 Издательство: Cambridge Academ Рейтинг: Цена: 5544.00 р. Наличие на складе: Есть у поставщика Поставка под заказ.
Описание: John Steinbeck remains enormously popular yet critics tend to dismiss his work as middlebrow and nostalgic. This study produces a Steinbeck for the twenty-first century, a thinker crucial to our understanding of issues such as climate change, growing social and racial inequality, and the relationship between the US and Latin America.
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