New Essays On Sister Carrie

The four essays in this 1991 volume discuss approaches to Sister Carrie.

In Theodore Dreiser's revolutionary first novel, Carrie Meeber, an 18-year-old girl without money or connections, ventures forth from her small town in search of a better life in booming, turn-of-the-century Chicago. The chronicle of Carrie's rise from obscurity to fame - and the effects of her progress on the men who use her and are used in turn - aroused a storm of controversy and debate upon its debut in 1900. The author's non-judgmental portrait of a heroine who violates the contemporary moral code outraged some critics and elated others; in fact, Dreiser had to fight against censorship in order to even get Sister Carriepublished. And it was not until 1981 that a completely unaltered edition was available. Sister Carriewas a movement away from the emphasis on morals of the Victorian era and focused more on realism and the base instincts of humans. Digging deeply into the psychological underpinnings of his characters, Dreiser gives us people who are often strangers to themselves, drifting numbly until fate pushes them on a path they can later neither defend nor even remember choosing. A century later, Dreiser's compelling plot and realistic characters continue to fascinate a whole different generation of readers.

A Study Guide for Theodore Dreiser's "Sister Carrie," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

The specially commissioned essays collected in this volume establish new parameters for both scholarly and classroom discussion of Dreiser. This Companion provides fresh perspectives on the frequently read classics, Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, as well as on topics of perennial interest, such as Dreiser's representation of the city and his prose style. The volume investigates topics such as his representation of masculinity and femininity, and his treatment of ethnicity. It is the most comprehensive introduction to Dreiser's work available.

Theodore Dreiser is indisputably one of America's most important twentieth-century novelists. An American Tragedy, Sister Carrie, and Jennie Gerhardt have all made an indelible mark on the American literary landscape. And yet, remarkably few critical books and no recent collections of critical essays have been published that attempt to answer current theoretical questions about Dreiser's entire canon. This collection is the first to appear in twenty-four years. The ten contributing essayists offer original interpretations of Dreiser's works from such disparate points of view as new historicism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism, film studies, and canon formation. A vital reassessment, Theodore Dreiser: Beyond Naturalism brings this influential modern writer into the 1990s by viewing him through the lens of the latest literary theory and cultural criticism.

The Great American Songbooks shows how popular music shapes and permeates a host of modernism's hallmark texts. Austin Graham begins his study of 20th-century texts with a discussion of American popular music and literature in the 19th century. He posits Walt Whitman as a proto-modernist who drew on his love of opera to create the epic free-verse poetry that would heavily influence his bardic successors. One can witness this in T. S. Eliot, whose poem The Waste Land relies on Whitman's verse style to emphasize how 19th-century structures of feeling regarding music persist into the 20th century. From opera and standards of the Victorian musical hall, Graham moves to the blues to reveal the multifaceted ways it shaped works in the Harlem Renaissance, most notably in the verse of Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer's stream-of-consciousness masterpiece, Cane. The second half of Songbooks advances an argument for a musical eclecticism that arose alongside rapid industrialization. Writers like Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos, Graham argues, developed a notion of musical eclecticism to help them process—or cope—with the unprecedented invasiveness of popular music, particularly in major cities. This eclecticism runs counter to critics like Adorno who equate popular music with mass produced mechanisms such as the phonograph and radio, and thus with degraded, cultural forms. In conclusion, Graham suggests how modernist writers experienced, and sometimes theorized, a more nuanced, sophisticated, and fluid mode of interaction with popular music.

Presenting a revisionary reading of German, Canadian, and American texts such as Fanny Essler, Settlers of the Marsh, and Sister Carrie, Gammel (English, U. of Prince Edward Island) attributes to naturalism, a predominantly male genre, the appropriation of a disruptive female sexuality not so much to "liberate" it from Victorian repression as to contain it within the male boundaries of naturalism. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR