Aesthetics Values And Autobiography In The Works Of Willa Cather And Marguerite Duras

This comparative critical study of Willa Cather and Marguerite Duras reveals the blurring of fiction and autobiography in their works, focusing on their concerns for women, children and the socially marginalized. The study highlights issues of power and authority relevant to the study of feminism and women's writing during and after the world wars.

“A truly addictive read” (Glamour) about how a young woman’s crush on a privileged former classmate becomes a story of love, lies, and dark obsession, offering stark insights into the immigrant experience, as it hurtles to its electrifying ending in this “twisty, unputdownable, psychological thriller” (People). Ivy Lin is a thief and a liar—but you’d never know it by looking at her. Raised outside of Boston, Ivy’s immigrant grandmother relies on Ivy’s mild appearance for cover as she teaches her granddaughter how to pilfer items from yard sales and second-hand shops. Thieving allows Ivy to accumulate the trappings of a suburban teen—and, most importantly, to attract the attention of Gideon Speyer, the golden boy of a wealthy political family. But when Ivy’s mother discovers her trespasses, punishment is swift and Ivy is sent to China, and her dream instantly evaporates. Years later, Ivy has grown into a poised yet restless young woman, haunted by her conflicting feelings about her upbringing and her family. Back in Boston, when Ivy bumps into Sylvia Speyer, Gideon’s sister, a reconnection with Gideon seems not only inevitable—it feels like fate. Slowly, Ivy sinks her claws into Gideon and the entire Speyer clan by attending fancy dinners, and weekend getaways to the cape. But just as Ivy is about to have everything she’s ever wanted, a ghost from her past resurfaces, threatening the nearly perfect life she’s worked so hard to build. Filled with surprising twists and a nuanced exploration of class and race, White Ivy is a “highly entertaining,” (The Washington Post) “propulsive debut” (San Francisco Chronicle) that offers a glimpse into the dark side of a woman who yearns for success at any cost.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE A New York Times Notable Book Annie Ernaux's father died exactly two months after she passed her practical examination for a teaching certificate. Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labor, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection. Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he attributed to manners and language that came so unnaturally to him as he struggled to provide for his family with a grocery store and cafe in rural France. Over the course of the book, Ernaux grows up to become the uncompromising observer now familiar to the world, while her father matures into old age with a staid appreciation for life as it is and for a daughter he cautiously, even reluctantly admires. A Man's Place is the companion book to her critically acclaimed memoir about her mother, A Woman's Story.

"Airspeed Oxford" is a novel about a translator for the secret service, Joan Yu, a young woman of Chinese, English and French descent, raised in England and educated at Oxford. After her father's death, Joan receives a memory box that includes an early formula for invisibility and buried plans for a secret aircraft, designed during WWII. This novel follows Joan's journey quest to develop a patent for invisibility and a new Airspeed Oxford, with the help of a few friends: a professor, a co-agent and a scientist living in the desert. Along the way, Joan meets a long lost aunt, confronts death, realizes childhood dreams and falls in love.

Critical Theory Today is the essential introduction to contemporary criticial theory. It provides clear, simple explanations and concrete examples of complex concepts, making a wide variety of commonly used critical theories accessible to novices without sacrificing any theoretical rigor or thoroughness. This new edition provides in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today: feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, reader-response theory, new criticism, structuralism and semiotics, deconstruction, new historicism, cultural criticism, lesbian/gay/queer theory, African American criticism, and postcolonial criticism. The chapters provide an extended explanation of each theory, using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and literary texts; a list of specific questions critics who use that theory ask about literary texts; an interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory; a list of questions for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to different literary works; and a bibliography of primary and secondary works for further reading.

What makes Willa Cather such an anomaly in American literature, and why are her late fictions so rarely read in high school and university classrooms? What is it exactly that renders them unclassifiable in the prevailing critical assessments of Cather's work? Why, in other works are these writings so difficult to interpret? Deborah Carlin addresses these and other questions by examining the ways in which certain reading communities have placed--or, more often, ignored--Cather's complex and unsettling post-1925 fiction within canonical formulations. Employing interpretive strategies drown from narratology, feminism, and deconstruction, Carlin focuses on five female-centered late fictions; My Mortal Enemy (1926), Shadows on the Rock (1931), "Old Mrs. Harris" in Obscure Destinies (1932), $ (1935), and Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). She argues that Cather's later works have been largely overlooked for two reasons: they confound reader expectations by revising conventional fictional forms; and they raise troubling questions about race, class, sexuality, and power, especially with regard to women. What makes Carlin's work distinctive, besides its focus on Cather's most problematic writings, is its theoretical approach to issues of narrative and gender. Rather than chart Cather's intellectual biography through the texts, as others have done, Carlin shows how the late fictions reflect self-conscious experimentation with narrative form and, at the same time, reveal ambiguous, sometimes contradictory, feminist impulses.

The poem offers a complicated mixture of self-assertion and deference, of shrewdness and wisdom, of self-respect and selfless love. Essays placing the "Memorandum" in its historical, literary, and theoretical contexts follow the text of the poem itself.