PaperBackSwap provides a convenient and inexpensive way to exchange books, but sometimes I have trouble finding quality books that are available on PaperBackSwap. Many of the brand new bestsellers are not yet available, and I do not want to waste my credits on mediocre mass paperbacks. On of my favorite genres is American historical fiction. […]
Tag Archives: American Fiction
“Magical Realism” is a broadly descriptive term for a movement in fiction originally brought to prominence by the surrealist works of Czech author Franz Kafka (1883-1924). In stories of this type, the framework or surface may be suitably realistic, but the opposite elements – supernatural, myth, dreams and fantasy – invade realism and change the […]
Having met the death of innocence, which at the time was considered the war to end all wars, the genre of American fiction became obsolete by the 1920s. The most elegant writers of elegant novels such as Henry James and Edith Wharton were either dead or on the way out of date, and in their […]
Cultural criticism is a phrase that is hard to pin down an exact meaning to. There are different psychological, sociological, and literary definitions of the term, as well as the academic definition those two words might garner even without association to another field. Perhaps this is part of what makes the phrase “cultural criticism” hard […]
Kate Chopin boldly expressed the unprepared spirit of feminism in her novel Arousal. Her famous work of fiction was not recognized at the time, because feminism had not yet become popular. Eble claimed that Chopin’s book was “too much drink for moral infants and should be labeled ‘poison’” (75). Chopin disdained the social assumptions of […]
In American literature, some classic works exist not only for the history contained within their pages, but also for the deeper social and political commentary they make. Such is the case in Upton Sinclair’s pivotal exposition of the American meatpacking industry of the early 1900s, “The Tungle.” In addition to telling the story of the […]