Article

The Newbery Award: A Survey of Fifty Years of Newbery Winners and Honor Books

January 1973

Authors:

To survey the Newbery Award books as a group, to recognize literary qualities to discern trends and changing patterns, and to perceive the influence of the books singled out as the best in American children's literature was the purpose of this study. For ease of comparison the books were grouped according to genre. The main features of each type were discussed and books were examined in relation to the criteria and to each other. Among the findings, the study revealed that books of historical fiction and fiction showing life in other lands predominated in the early decades. A gradual progression toward the selection of realistic fiction set within the United States was observed. Over the fifty years that the Newbery Medal has been awarded, changes in subject matter and theme evolved. Settings became more functional and there was increased emphasis on characterization and theme. Young Americans were protagonists more frequently in recent years, and action shifted from the externally adventurous to the psychologically motivated. Although modifications in form, style, and technique emerged, the books, almost without exception, were well-written. (Author/WR)

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Article

Representativeness in Corpora of Literary Texts: Introducing the C18P Project

July 2016 · Matlit Revista do Programa de Doutoramento em Materialidades da Literatura

Iris Gemeinböck

Currently there are very few specialised corpora of literary texts that are tailored to the needs of literary critics who are interested in corpus stylistic analyses of prose fiction. Many existing corpora including literary texts were compiled for linguistic research interests and are often unsuitable for corpus stylistic purposes. The paper addresses three of the main problems: the absence of ... [Show full abstract] labelling of the texts for literary genre, the use of extracts, and the prevalence of linguistic periodisation schemes. C18P is a corpus of prose fiction designed specifically to address these issues. It traces the early development of the novel from 1700 up until the Victorian era. It can, for instance, be used for an analysis of the characteristic linguistic features of individual literary genres and forms. The following paper introduces the design of the corpus as well as some of its potential uses. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14195/2182-8830_4-2_2

Book

Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939

January 2018

James Machin

This book is the first study of how ‘weird fiction’ emerged from Victorian supernatural literature, abandoning the more conventional Gothic horrors of the past for the contemporary weird tale. It investigates the careers and fiction of a range of the British writers who inspired H. P. Lovecraft, such as Arthur Machen, M. P. Shiel, and John Buchan, to shed light on the tensions between ‘literary’ ... [Show full abstract] and ‘genre’ fiction that continue to this day. Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939 focuses on the key literary and cultural contexts of weird fiction of the period, including Decadence, paganism, and the occult, and discusses how these later impacted on the seminal American pulp magazine Weird Tales. This ground-breaking book will appeal to scholars of weird, horror and Gothic fiction, genre studies, Decadence, popular fiction, the occult, and Fin-de-Siècle cultural history.

Article

Catedral / R. Carver ; tr. por Benito Gómez Ibáñez.

January 1970

Raymond Carver

Traducción de: Cathedral Raymond Carver (Clatskanie, 1938 - Port Angeles, 1988), cuentista y poeta considerado uno de los máximos autores de la literatura norteamericana de la segunda mitad del siglo XX, asociado con las corrientes del realismo sucio y el minimalismo por sus descripciones de las vidas cotidianas de personas comunes de la clase media-baja. Inicia su trayectoria con el cuento "The ... [Show full abstract] Furious Season" (1960) y es seleccionado para la antología Best American Short Stories 1967, pero sus primeros libros son de poesía: Near Klamath (1967), Winter Insomnia (1970) y At Night the Salmon Move: Poems (1976). Tras ser reconocido tres veces con menciones del Premio O. Henry por sus relatos y mientras ejerce la docencia en varias universidades, ¿Quieres hacer el favor de callarte, por favor? (1976), su primer volumen de cuentos, es nombrado finalista para el National Book Award, categoría de ficción, en 1977. Pareja sentimental de la poeta Tess Gallagher desde fines de los años 1970, es galardonado finalmente con el primer Premio O. Henry en 1983 y presenta dos colecciones más de relatos: De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de amor (1981) y Catedral (1983), elogiado como su mejor libro. Los volúmenes de cuentos Where I’m Calling From: New and Selected Stories (1988), citado por el diario The New York Times como una de las mejores obras de ficción de los años 1981-1986, y Si me necesitas, llámame (2000); los poemarios Donde hayan vivido (1988), Un sendero nuevo a la cascada (1989) y Todos nosotros: poesía reunida (1996); Sin heroísmos, por favor: prosa, poesía y crítica literaria (1992) y Short Cuts: vidas cruzadas (1993) forman parte de la mucho más abundante obra póstuma del autor, fallecido en pleno apogeo y que se definía a sí mismo como inclinado "hacia la brevedad y la intensidad".

Article

Now That We Know …

January 2010 · MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U S

Aldon Lynn Nielsen

Having heard his name announced as the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry for 2006, Nathaniel Mackey made his way from the floor to the podium, slowly extracted a paper from his pocket, looked out at the audience and said, "Now we know." But what did we know, and when did we know it? Along with the audience in New York, we knew in this moment that Nathaniel Mackey had been selected from ... [Show full abstract] among the attending finalists for the National Book Award for Poetry. Those of us who track such matters knew in this moment that this was only the third time in the history of the National Book Awards that a black poet had been so honored. There were no African American artists selected for the prize in the forty-nine years from its inception in 1950 to 1999, when the poet Ai was honored for her Vice: New and Selected Poems. The following year, Lucille Clifton was presented with the award, again for a volume of "new and selected" poems (Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000), and then there were no more black winners until Mackey took the stage in 2006 to receive the award for Splay Anthem, marking the first time ever that an African American poet was honored for something that was not a selection from his life's work (although given Mackey's lifelong commitment to seriality in composition, such distinctions may not mean a great deal in his case). And some of us noted that possessive pronoun as well: "his." It made a difference. This was the first time that any black man had ever received the National Book Award for poetry. For that matter, after the 1953 award in fiction to Ralph Ellison (the first National Book Award in any literary category to any black man), the second fiction award presented to an African American man did not come till 1990, when Charles Johnson's remarkable novel Middle Passage was honored, an award that immediately drew a denunciation from powerful conservative and founding Vice President of the National Association of Scholars, Carol Iannone, who saw in the award to Johnson the early signs of a supposed dictatorship of politically correct ethnic mediocrity. There were other African Americans honored. Alice Walker and Gloria Naylor won in fiction, and the foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters has gone to Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, and the redoubtable Oprah Winfrey. We knew something else as well, in that moment of the honor. Despite the fact that the National Book Award for Poetry had in its early years gone to William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore, despite the appearance among the lists of honorees of John Ashbery, for the most part the judging panels have gone straight for America's middlebrow. Though it would be hard to argue against the quality of the winners over the years, it would be equally difficult to justify the continued neglect of the poets who were most insistently exploring the territories outlined by Williams, Stevens, and Moore, let alone Sterling Brown and Melvin B. Tolson. Mackey's award was, then, a perfect storm of the unexpected and the overdue. It is not hard to point to various factors that lent themselves to this felicitous outcome: Splay Anthem was, unlike most of Mackey's work, published by a venerable New York press. The judging panel for 2006 included other poets more likely than many to be conversant with and sympathetic to the adventurous and demanding aesthetic of Mackey's serial lyric inventions. But, should we allow ourselves to admit it, there is something else we knew immediately about the rarity of Mackey's 2006 honor. In Paracritical Hinge, Mackey comments that "the relevance of experimentalism to African American writing and of African American writing to experimentalism needs to be insisted on and accorded its place in the discourse attending African American literature and in the discourse attending experimental writing" (243). Suffice it to say that neither the National Book Awards nor America's literary/critical apparatus at large has shown itself to be in any hurry to meet with Mackey's imperatives. We...

Article

A CIRCLE OF SISTERS: AN INTERTEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF AFRO-AMERICAN WOMEN'S NOVELS (HURSTON, WALKER, MORR...

January 1986

MICHAEL AWKWARD

Feminist and Afro-American literary critics have suggested that Zora Neale Hurston represents for contemporary black women writers an important precursorial figure. To this point, however, very little of this criticism has done more than be suggestive about connections between Hurston's corpus and that of her purported literary descendants. In this dissertation, I attempt to demonstrate ... [Show full abstract] intertextual connections between Hurston's classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God and three of the most imaginative and important novels by Afro-American women in the last twenty years: Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, and Alice Walker's The Color Purple. These connections center largely around subsequent women's refigurations of Hurston's delineations in her novel of a female protagonist Janie's quest for self-integration and a supportive community. Additionally, this dissertation focuses on the means by which these novelists infuse the Western literary genre of the novel with Afro-American expressive potentials (or what I term denigration) and the implications of the fact that, unlike competitive male (both white and black) textual systems, this "circle of texts" represents a cooperative system of tropological refiguration.

Article

A Comparative Study of Literature Through Folk Tale Variants

January 1980 · Language Arts

Linda E. Western

Tells benefits of approaching the study of literature through a study of folk tale variants; suggests a plan for helping children analyze and compare folk tale variants. Includes a model of a discussion based on three versions of "Jack and the Beanstalk," and lists and annotates variant editions of nine familiar folk tales. (ET)

Article

A Russian View of Childhood: The Contribution of Kornei I. Chukovsky (1882-1969)

January 1974

Mary Orvig

Reviews the life and works of Kornei I. Chukovsky and discusses his contribution to children's literature. (RB)

Article

Autobiography and Education

January 1989 · Journal of Educational Thought

Robert J. Graham

Autobiography has emerged within a number of educational endeavors as an informing principle which directs both theory and practice. This article argues that despite this activity, there is still little widespread appreciation with in education for its special characteristics as a literary genre. The paper maps out the ontological status of autobiography. By analyzing three major contributions to ... [Show full abstract] the theory of the genre, its boundaries and key concepts are revealed and discussed. The paper recommends that educators become more familf.ar with the genre in order to appreciate both its complexities and potential.

Chapter

On The Golden Bowl

January 1988

John Halperin

Since its publication in 1904, The Golden Bowl has been a focal point around which much of the literary criticism of the James revival has swirled. The novel is often cited by the Jamesians as the apotheosis of the art of the Master; Leon Edel calls it, simply, “the richest of all [James’s] creations,” the “summit” of “his career as a novelist.” The anti-Jamesians have fastened onto it as an ... [Show full abstract] example of what is most spectacularly repugnant to them in James’s work. James himself, who once referred to The Ambassadors as the “best, all round” of his novels, told his agent and his publisher as he was finishing The Golden Bowl that he was “producing the best book I have ever done.” The novel, he wrote to Scribner’s, was “the most composed and constructed and completed” of his “productions” — “the solidest, as yet, of all my fictions.”

Article

ÇOCUK HİKAYELERİ: KONU ve FİKİR MESELELERİ (1970-80Lİ YILLAR)

January 2015 · the Journal of Academic Social Sciences

Rövşen Memmedov

The article is dedicated to the Azerbaijani children’s stories. As is known, a story has always carried an importance as a leading literary genre. For this reason, writers of children’s books prefer this genre in their works. The article explores the story genre, informs us about its structure and composition, and analyzes this genre of children’s literature of 1970s-1980s from the viewpoint of ... [Show full abstract] thematic and content features. The article also analyzes the works of the most prominent writers of children’s books of that period through the contemporary prism and compares them with our days. The works of writers, such as Z.Khalil, A.Samadly, N.Suleymanov, T.Mahmud, E.Bakhysh, M.Aslan, A.Mansurzade, F.Tarverdiyev and A.Ahmadova are scrutinized in the article through the literary requirements of our days. Apart from that, the article draws scientific comparisons from the works of the world’s such prominent writers as Hans Christian Andersen, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Lewis Carroll, Charles Perrault, Astrid Lindgren, Nikolai Nosov, Victor Dragunsky, etc. The article highlights the place and role of the children’s stories in the Azerbaijani literature and the views of the literary critics (B.Nabiyev, R.Yusifoglu, F.Asgarli, etc) on the children’s literature of that period. It should be that the stories have been classified and analyzed by varios issues (family and domestic, educational, national values, ethical).

Thesis

Rhetorics of the Fantastic: Re-Examining Fantasy as Action, Object, and Experience

December 2018

David Rick

Establishing the literary genre of fantasy, as it is currently known, is largely credited to J. R. R. Tolkien in the mid-twentieth century, though in a broader sense fantastical storytelling has existed for as long as humans have been telling stories. Since its rise to popularity as a contemporary genre, many scholars have studied fantasy in various dimensions, but such study has tended to ... [Show full abstract] emphasize genre taxonomy, remaining otherwise generally limited in scope and narrow in focus. This dissertation seeks to complicate an understanding of the term “fantasy,” particularly as it differs from commodified, market-driven genre conventions. It argues that the fantastic represents departure, transformation, and alternative modes of thinking. The project examines major writings on fantasy and the fantastic, including works by writers such as Tzvetan Todorov, Farah Mendlesohn, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Tolkien. It also examines how the fantastic manifests in works not usually thought of as fantasy, as in the writings of Gloria Anzaldúa, and draws upon rhetorical thinkers, such as Wayne Booth and William Covino, while borrowing Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic pentad as a central device to establish a “fantastical pentad.” Part One of this dissertation examines three major capacities of this fantastical pentad: action, object, and experience. As action, the fantastic has the power to complicate, to reimagine—what Tolkien called “sub-creation” and what Paulo Freire called “re-creation.” This produces a fantastical object, or fantasy, that embodies the transformative power of the fantastical act, allowing others to experience it. In turn, experiencing a transformative fantasy offers the opportunity for questioning, evaluating what that fantasy is, how it may or may not be plausible within one’s worldview, and to understand why it is fantastical—that is, what it seeks to transform. Part Two applies these ideas to three sites of inquiry: the composition classroom, games and play, and popular fiction. The project concludes that the fantastic offers, as its primary function, not escapism or mere “flight of fancy,” as has often been claimed in the past, but transformation. This transformation may work in many ways: it may be transformative for the fantasist, who enacts the fantastic; it can be transformative for the audience, who experience the fantasy that the fantasist creates; or, it can be transformative within the object, itself, by reimagining some convention within the writing. This compositional transformation may be a narrative element of fiction such as in the works of Le Guin, where the fantasy is transformative within its genre, or in the writing of Anzaldúa, which blend the fantastic with non-fiction for very material, real-world purposes. This illustrates a cultural significance that reaches far beyond the realm of idle entertainment, providing inspiration and impetus to enact change in the material world.

Article

Full-text available

Robert Merle théoricien et praticien de la politique-fiction: Pour que le « pas encore » devienne un...

May 2015 · ReS Futurae

Anne Wattel

In the 70’s, in the midst of the Cold War, a literary genre, both disregarded and often described as "hybrid”, – political fiction – develops in Anglo-Saxon countries. Robert Merle is the first literary critic, theorist and practitioner of this genre in France. As he has just finished his novel The Day of the Dolphin, Merle lays out, in a special issue of Le Monde in October 1967, the golden ... [Show full abstract] rules of political fiction: a short-term anticipation which introduces one or several minor variables, a critical vision in keeping with a serious genre, which reveals and alerts against the planetary anguish that grips mankind in the second half of the twentieth century. But Merle’s political fiction differs from its American counterpart: it is based on scientific advance; it rejects all false and artificial optimism, all happy endings; and, first and foremost, it has a philosophical reach that makes it long-lasting.