bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Representation of Intonation
Authors: Arvaniti Amalia
Published: August 2017

It is a well‐known truism that no utterance is ever produced in a strict monotone; all utterances, in all languages, show some pitch modulation. Such changes in pitch – impressionistically described as rises and falls – are due to changes in fundamental frequency or F0, the physical property of the speech signal that is determined by the basic rate of vibration of the vocal folds and gives rise to the percept of pitch.
Extrametricality and Non‐Finality
Authors: Hyde Brett
Published: August 2017

Extrametricality
and
non‐finality
are often treated as two terms that refer to the same principle of final stress avoidance, the former being implemented in a rule‐based framework and the latter being implemented in a constraint‐based framework. The labels and native frameworks of the two approaches, however, do not constitute the full extent of their differences. As Prince and Smolensky (1993) explain, extrametricality focuses on the parsability of prosodic constituents, while non‐finality focuses on the position of stress peaks. Extrametricality is concerned primarily with dominance relations, and non‐finality is concerned primarily with prominence relations.
Positional Effects in Consonant Clusters
Authors: Jun Jongho
Published: August 2017

It is commonly observed across languages that phonological processes may apply only in certain (“non‐prominent”) positions. In contrast, elements in other (“prominent”) positions typically resist or trigger these processes. Such prominentvs. non‐prominent positional distinctions are further applicable to more general patterns of licensing and neutralization of phonological contrasts; namely, featural/segmental contrasts are likely to be licensed in prominent positions, whereas these contrasts are likely to be neutralized in non‐prominent positions. Pairs of prominent and non‐prominent positions include word‐initialvs. non‐initial, stressedvs. unstressed, rootvs. affix, and prevocalicvs. preconsonantal positions. Among the positional effects involving these pairs, this chapter is mainly concerned with those involving the two members of intervocalic consonant clusters. See Beckman (1998) and Barnes (2006) for recent extensive investigations of other positional effects; see alsochapterroot—affix asymmetriesandchaptercategory‐specific effects. In intervocalic C1C2clusters, the preconsonantal C1is more likely to undergo phonological processes such as voicing and place assimilation, in contrast with the prevocalic C2, which is rarely subject to such processes. I will refer to this asymmetric positional effect as the C2dominance effect.
Stress‐Timedvs. Syllable‐Timed Languages
Authors: Nespor Marina , Shukla Mohinish , Mehler Jacques
Published: August 2017

Rhythm characterizes most natural phenomena: heartbeats have a rhythmic organization, and so do the waves of the sea, the alternation of day and night, and bird songs. Language is yet another natural phenomenon that is characterized by rhythm. What is rhythm? Is it possible to give a general enough definition of rhythm to include all the phenomena we just mentioned? The origin of the wordrhythmis the Greek word ϱυθμóς, derived from the verb ϱεí, which means ‘to flow’. We could say that rhythm determines the flow of different phenomena.
Markedness and Faithfulness Constraints
Authors: de Lacy Paul
Published: August 2017

Objects and mechanisms called “constraints” have featured in many theories of the phonological and syntactic modules. However, the explicit bifurcation into “markedness and faithfulness” constraints is specifically found in Optimality Theory (OT; Prince and Smolensky 1993) and its developments (especially McCarthy and Prince 1999), as well as in theories based on OT (Stochastic OT: Boersma and Hayes 2001; Targeted Constraint Theory: Wilson 2001; OT with Candidate Chains: McCarthy 2007; Stratal OT: Bermúdez‐Otero, forthcoming; Kiparsky, forthcoming). So this chapter focuses on the things called “constraints” in OT (specifically the “classical OT” of Prince and Smolensky 1993 and McCarthy and Prince 1999). In particular, it focuses on OT constraints in the phonological module; there are also OT theories of the syntactic module and OT theories of morphology – they will not be discussed here.
Nasal Harmony
Authors: Walker Rachel
Published: August 2017

Nasal harmony refers to phonological patterns where nasalization is transmitted in long‐distance fashion. The long‐distance nature of nasal harmony can be met by the transmission of nasalization either to a series of segments or to a non‐adjacent segment. Nasal harmony usually occurs within words or a smaller domain, either morphologically or prosodically defined. This chapter introduces the chief characteristics of nasal harmony patterns with exemplification, and highlights related theoretical themes. It focuses primarily on the different roles that segments can play in nasal harmony, and the typological properties to which they give rise. The following terminological conventions will be assumed. Atriggeris a segment that initiates nasal harmony. Atargetis a segment that undergoes harmony. Anopaque segmentorblockerhalts nasal harmony. Atransparent segmentis one that does not display nasalization within a span of nasal harmony, but does not halt harmony from transmitting beyond it.
Paradigms
Authors: Albright Adam
Published: August 2017

Morphological paradigms are a mainstay of traditional descriptions of inflectional systems and of diachronic change. Only in recent years, however, have paradigms played a formal role in the grammatical analysis of phonological systems, in the form of correspondence constraints and contrast constraints on paradigmatically related forms. In this chapter I review some of the evidence that has been taken to indicate that paradigm structure plays an active role in synchronic phonology, and discuss some of the grammatical mechanisms that have been proposed to capture such effects, focusing especially on work within Optimality Theory (OT: Prince and Smolensky 2004).
Clitics
Authors: Anderson Stephen R.
Published: August 2017

The notion of “clitic” derives from one of the oldest problems in the study of language: how to define the “word”. Grammarians have long noted that a difficulty is posed in this area by the fact that certain elements in many languages seem to play an independent role in the grammatical structure of sentences, and thus to warrant the status of “grammatical words,” but in terms of their sound structure form parts of unitary “words” (in a distinct, phonological sense) with other “grammatical words”. Examples such as those in (1) from Homeric Greek are typical of the phenomenon.1
Derived Environment Effects
Authors: Burzio Luigi
Published: August 2017

Derived environments often exhibit peculiar phonological properties. Notable effects can be identified relative to various senses of “derived” in the expression “derived environment” (DE). In all cases, “environment” refers to some phonological context. Such environment or context can be “derived” in a phonological sense, by virtue of some phonological process having applied to obtain it or, in a morphological sense, by virtue of it being the result of the combination of morphemes or other morphological operation. The following sections will first review the different cases from a descriptive point of view, and then turn to their respective theoretical accounts. §2 and §3 review the basic facts, arguing that there are three subcases overall. §4 turns to contemporary analyses of the two better‐known subcases, while §5 reviews pre‐Optimality Theory accounts of the same. §6 presents an account of the third subcase.
Vowel Harmony: Opaque and Transparent Vowels
Authors: Gafos Adamantios I. , Dye Amanda
Published: August 2017

In linguistic theory, there is a tension between two core aims of the field: theoretical parsimony and empirical coverage of the remarkable diversity and specificity seen in linguistic data. Vowel harmony, and more specifically the two phenomena of transparency and opacity in vowel harmony that concern us in this chapter, provide prime examples of phonological research concerned with resolving this tension.1Recent findings and promising new theoretical ideas on transparency and opacity indicate that our understanding of these phenomena is at a critical stage. The crucial future step will be the integration of the new data patterns with insights from theoretical analyses. This will require an improved understanding of the phonetic basis of vowel harmony, of the nature and origin of the grammatical forces governing transparency and opacity, and finally of the organizational principles governing the resolution of these forces within and across languages.
Phonologically Conditioned Allomorph Selection
Authors: Nevins Andrew
Published: August 2017

Since Jakobson's (1948) analysis of Russian verbs as having one stem rather than two, it has been an attempt of generative phonology to minimize distinctly listed allomorphs in favor of phonological rules, some of which may be morphologically specific. Nonetheless there are certain allomorphs that cannot be derived one from the other, leading to “multiple URs” for the same morphemic category, such as the Moroccan 3rd person object clitic, which varies between the allomorphs ‐h(chosen after vowel‐final stems) and ‐u(chosen after consonant‐final stems), as will be discussed in §1.3 below. Such cases require distinct suppletive allomorphs, whose distribution is determined according to their phonological environments. The division of labor in dealing with allomorphy, then, is taken up both by purely phonological rules (such as those responsible for the voicing alternations of the English plural morpheme) and by morphological selection among separately listed allomorphs competing for insertion. In this chapter, we focus on the latter type of alternation between morphemes, while emphasizing that many cases of allomorphy not included in the present discussion are still best handled by phonological derivations from a single underlying form.
Flapping in American English
Authors: De Jong Kenneth J.
Published: August 2017

In the mid‐1930s, several scholars of American English from around the USA noted a peculiarity that, apparently, was becoming a pervasive and characterizing feature of the production of coronal stops in certain intervocalic positions. A high‐profile notation of the phenomenon was by John Kenyon in the sixth edition ofAmerican Pronunciation, where he notes the presence of /t/s that are voiced in American, as opposed to British, productions. What gathered more original scholarly attention to this phenomenon is the question of how to characterize these productions. Haugen (1938) noted in particular that the productions of /t/ in words likepityhad become so different from that in words liketypicalthat classifying them as the same segment was becoming untenable, and so he posited the presence of an allophone of /t/ in American English.
Angry Young Man Fiction
Authors: Bentley Nick
Published: August 2017

The term “angry young man” refers to a loose grouping of British writers, mainly dramatists and novelists, who emerged in the mid‐ to late 1950s. As the term suggests, most of the writers associated with the group were relatively young and male, and their anger was generally directed toward what they perceived as the establishment or the prevailing ideologies of British society in the 1950s. That most of them (and their fictional heroes) came from working‐ or lower‐middle‐class backgrounds suggests that class distinction was one of the main causes of the anger they presented in their work. The term also refers to some of the characters that appeared in the texts they produced. Therefore, it assumed a wider cultural significance and was applied, often uncritically, to any young, predominantly white, male figure who had some sense of grievance against his parents' generation, or the establishment, or both.
B
erger,
J
ohn
Authors: Scribner Charity
Published: August 2017

For more than a half century, John Berger has held a unique position in British and European culture, making his mark in literature, the visual arts, and mass media. Testing aesthetic models and advancing a socialist critique, his work establishes vital links between modernism and some of the most recent tendencies in performance and cinema.
B
olger,
D
ermot
Authors: Johnsen William A.
Published: August 2017

Dermot Bolger was 9 years old in 1968 when universal secondary education finally became the law in Ireland. This belated upgrade (well behind other modern nations) perhaps explains his bold conviction that what he needed to do to become a writer after secondary school at Beneavin College was practice, not more school. He worked variously as a factory hand and as a driver/librarian for a mobile library until he could support himself by writing. It may explain as well his remarkable non‐competitive attunement to the hidden lives of others, especially those who don t go to university. He writes of and for this new generation, bringing it into the mainstream of Irish literature. He currently lives in Finglas, the Dublin working‐class suburb where he was born in 1959.
C
arter,
A
ngela
Authors: Koenigsberger Kurt
Published: August 2017

The richness and capaciousness of Angela Carter's fiction sometimes evokes nothing so much as the circus ring in her novel
Nights at the Circus
(1984) which serves as a microcosm of the world at large. Indeed, Carter envisioned the capacities of fiction to be as expansive as the world itself. She contended that “fiction can do anything it wants to do. I think it can do more things than we tend to think it can.” Her idea of the novel in particular was positively unbounded: “anything that wants to call itself a novel is a novel, by definition” (1985b [1984]). On the other hand, Carter's stories and novels present models of the world that are frequently intimate and bounded: her work eschews carefully plotted generic closure in favor of a series of carefully crafted set pieces and tableaux.
D
rabble,
M
argaret
Authors: Brownley Martine Watson
Published: August 2017

Over a long and productive writing career dating from the early 1960s, Margaret Drabble has been best known for novels that trace the lives of her generation of educated women and the different challenges that these women faced as they matured. Drabble is a distinguished contemporary woman of letters; in addition to her 17 novels, she has also produced biography, literary criticism and scholarship, journalistic commentary, and other fictional and non‐fictional prose.
F
orster,
E
.
M
.
Authors: Childs Peter
Published: August 2017

Edward Morgan Forster is most well known for the handful of novels he published in his lifetime but he was also successful as a short story writer, biographer, critic, librettist, and travel writer. His four early novels situated him as an astute observer of contemporary manners and mores, which he chiefly portrayed in social comedies that have a lineage from the fiction of Jane Austen to the plays of Oscar Wilde. He shared with the latter a frustration over the unacceptability of writing openly about homosexuality and his early work concerned the restrictions placed on personal freedom by English sensibilities. However, his later work, especially his last novel
A Passage to India
(1924), has much in common with the experimentations of modernism in its use of symbolism and what Forster calls “rhythm” in his book on fiction
Aspects of the Novel
(1927).
G
alloway,
J
anice
Authors: Mcmillan Dorothy
Published: August 2017

Janice Galloway, born in 1955, was brought up in Saltcoats, Ayrshire, by her mother, whose life was a constant struggle after she left her destructive, drunken husband. Galloway's childhood was dominated by a much older sister who returned, having left her own husband and child, to tyrannize the household. Yet, love of reading and music provided freedoms in the midst of emotional and material deprivations. At her secondary school, Ardrossan Academy, she was encouraged intellectually and musically by a charismatic teacher, Ken Hetherington. She studied music and English at Glasgow University and taught in Ayrshire for 10 years before
The Trick is to Keep Breathing
kickstarted her writing career in 1990. Since then Galloway has made herself into an impressively professional woman of letters, indeed of more than letters for her repertoire includes short stories; poems; theatrical, operatic, and sculptural collaborations; editing and music reviewing, as well as four novels,
The Trick, Foreign Parts, Clara
and
This Is Not About Me
in which the various interests converge. Literary, visual, and musical experiments inform the techniques of the four long fictions; and the long and short fictions assist each other, since Galloway often suggests that women's lives are best represented as a series of short stories or vignettes with repeated epiphanies or clarifications, rather than as plot‐driven toward definitive closure. She exploits the visual possibilities of the page, and the structure of
Clara
roughly follows Robert Schumann's song cycle
Frauen Liebe und Leben
(Woman's Life and Love). Galloway's determination to transform rather than be limited by conventions, whether literary, typographical, political, or sociological, characterizes her feminism which may, given the depressing nature of some her subject matter, at times seem down, yet is never out. Galloway refuses to be limited by fixed categories – Scottish novelist, Glasgow novelist, woman novelist. In various interviews she insists that she simply gets on with it – if critics find schools and patterns that is their affair. She admits the significance for her work of Alasdair Gray and Marguerite Duras, admires Catherine Carswell and Jessie Kesson, but insists that nothing that a writer reads or experiences is ever wasted.
Gray,Alasdair
Authors: Bernstein Stephen
Published: August 2017

A key figure in the late twentieth‐century rejuvenation of Scottish fiction, Alasdair Gray has exhibited his diverse talents in novels, short stories, poetry, drama, criticism, polemic, painting, drawing, and book illustration and design. Gray's writing is notable for its mixture of literarygenres; its focus on politics at all levels, from personal relationships to governments; and its constant attention to the consequences of human efforts to achieve a utopian reality. Several of Gray's novels also feature various metafictional elements. He is fond of appending explanatory notes, acknowledgments, postscripts, and sections of self‐conscious “Critic‐Fuel” itemizing sources. Many of his books end with the word “goodbye,” a habit Gray appears to have observed in Flann O Brien'sAt Swim‐Two‐Birds. As these features coalesce, Gray's strongest works are nearly encyclopedic in sweep, compendia of wit, analysis, and wild invention.
G
reen,
H
enry
Authors: Mackay Marina
Published: August 2017

Henry Green began his career only in the aftermath of modernism's canonical achievements, producing most of his major work between the late 1930s and the early 1950s. This belatedness means that he does not fit easily into conventional narratives of literary modernism, which tend not to look beyond the 1910s and 1920s, and helps to explain his relative obscurity. For the same reason, though, he is potentially a significant figure because his powerfully idiosyncratic fiction helps to show how English literary modernism survived the deaths of its most famous practitioners. His characteristic prose style is instantly recognizable but hard to generalize about, moving as it does with artful unpredictability between romantic cadenzas and comic bathos, between extreme authorial self‐effacement and blurting revelation. His subject matter is easier to describe: “Living” is the title of one of his best‐known and most experimental novels, but it could stand for all his novels, with their reverential attention to the unlikely poetry of everyday life.
Lewis,Wyndham
Authors: Edwards Paul
Published: August 2017

Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) wrote over 40 books including 14 fictional works. Others are concerned with literature, art and aesthetics, and cultural, political, and philosophical analysis. As a painter he pioneered the form of geometrical abstraction that characterized Vorticism and editedBlast(two issues, 1914 and 1915), publishing Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, and Rebecca West. Lewis was a major figure in British art until blindness overtook him in 1951. His portraits of James Joyce, Pound, and Eliot are memorable and definitive. These fellow “Men of 1914” regarded Lewis as their equal (sometimes as a worthy antagonist), but the critical industry around his work remains small.
London in Fiction
Authors: Chan Winnie
Published: August 2017

Its fabled landmarks might be easily located in the familiarA–Zatlas, but London as portrayed in twentieth‐century fiction is a place of myth. Historic yet constantly changing, cosmopolitan yet stolidly English, the city is incomprehensible, a universal microcosm that has seized the imagination of just about every novelist in Britain, not to mention its far‐flung former colonies. These writers have made London the setting, if not the subject, of their diverse fictions, which depict so many Londons that they defy description. Yet in them the city is somehow always instantly recognizable.
M
acaulay,
R
ose
Authors: Crawford Alice
Published: August 2017

Rose Macaulay (1881–1958) is best known for her last novel
The Towers of Trebizond
(1956), with its famous opening line, “‘Take my camel, dear,' said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.” The full extent of her oeuvre is frequently not recognized. Author of 23 novels between 1906 and 1956, she was also a prolific journalist, BBC broadcaster, and writer of travel and history books, as well as of literary criticism, poems, and plays. Themes of quest and the pursuit of wholeness preoccupy her, and her writing interrogates constantly the idea of the soul's search for fulfillment. Struggles of the female quester concern her consistently, and images of androgyny characterize much of her work.
M
o,
T
imothy
Authors: Ho Elaine Yee Lin
Published: August 2017

Born in 1950, Timothy Mo read History at St. John's College, Oxford, and worked as a reporter for
Boxing News
before becoming a full‐time writer. His Chinese father and English mother divorced when he was 18 months old. The first nine years of his life were spent in Hong Kong where he was educated first in a Chinese convent school and then in a school for the children of English expatriates. This formative experience is related in a little‐known but important essay (Mo 1996) published long after he had achieved recognition as a novelist. The essay offers an explanatory narrative for the way his career and identity as a writer unfolded over two decades. In hindsight, Mo sees himself as a child “endowed through genes and upbringing with a precocious conceptual intelligence, adrift within an ideographic literary culture” (305), stifled by teachers who compelled him to read and write Chinese characters. In the English school, which he found liberating, he learnt boxing and developed a preference for Anglo‐Western culture and stories of action and adventure.
Murdoch,Iris
Authors: Nicol Bran
Published: August 2017

Iris Jean Murdoch was a singular figure in twentieth‐century literature. In addition to being one of the most distinctive postwar British novelists, producing 26 novels (as well as five plays, a book of poems, a libretto, and a recently rediscovered short story), she was also an esteemed moral philosopher, publishing numerous philosophical books and essays. Murdoch's fiction is an interesting combination of the “classic realist” emphasis on character and detailed description and the conventions of prose romance. Her plots are gripping and full of bizarre twists and coincidences that disrupt the apparent stability of the lives of her characters. Nevertheless her character's experiences, and the way they respond, mean that her novels are serious explorations of profound philosophical questions such as the nature of goodness, love, spirituality, power, and death.
Orwell,George
Authors: Patai Daphne
Published: August 2017

George Orwell, considered by many to be one of the great political writers in the English language, was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903, in Motihari, Bengal, India, at the time a British colony. His father, Richard Blair, was a subdeputy opium agent in the Indian Civil Service who, in 1897, married Ida Mabel Limouzin, daughter of a Frenchman living in Burma. In 1904, when Eric was a year old, Ida Blair moved back to England with him and his elder sister. Another sister was born a few years later. For the next eight years, Eric rarely saw his father.
P
owell,
A
nthony
Authors: Birns Nicholas
Published: August 2017

Anthony Dymoke Powell was born December 21, 1905 in London. His father was a military officer of Welsh and English ancestry, his mother a descendant of Lincolnshire landowners. Powell attended the New Beacon School, a preparatory school in Sussex, and then Eton and Oxford. Though his family had enough money to send him to institutions associated with the upper class, he was not himself of the aristocracy. Powell went to London to work at the Duckworth publishing firm, which produced his first novel,
Afternoon Men
(1931), a chronicle of jaded, disaffected young Londoners which served as a drily inconclusive generational manifesto for a cohort born in the twentieth century and inured to its disillusionments.
Venusberg
(1932), his second novel, is set in an unnamed Baltic country, while
From a View to a Death
(1933), his third, is set among the English landowning class and concerns hunting, transvestism, and social aspiration.
Richardson,Dorothy
Authors: McCracken Scott
Published: August 2017

Dorothy Richardson was born into a middle‐class family in the small town of Abingdon, just south of Oxford. Her father lost most of his money when she was a teenager and the family moved to London, where she attended a progressive school influenced by the ideas of John Ruskin. At 17, when the family's financial situation deteriorated further, she went to work as a teacher in Germany, then as a governess and teacher in England, and eventually as a receptionist in a dental surgery in Harley Street. While working in London in the 1890s and early 1900s, Richardson lived in lodgings in Bloomsbury and associated with writers, political radicals, and European exiles. Several of the men and women she had relationships with at this time figure in her long prose work,Pilgrimage, for example, Benjamin Grad (Michael Shatov inPilgrimage), Veronica Leslie Jones (Amabel), and H. G. Wells (Hypo Wilson). Her affair with Wells resulted in a miscarriage and this seems to have precipitated her decision to become a writer.
S
mith,
Z
adie
Authors: Foster Dennis A.
Published: August 2017

Zadie Smith emerged as one of the most important young novelists in Britain in 2000 with the publication of
White Teeth
. Her three novels to date explore the crossings and conflicts of race, religion, class, and culture in contemporary family, politics, and business. She is at the forefront of multicultural writers and was listed by
Granta
in its “Best of Young British Novelists 3” (2003).
Welsh Fiction inEnglish
Authors: Knight Stephen
Published: August 2017

Medieval Wales, like Ireland, had a rich prose fiction in Celtic, but there is no direct link to modern English‐language fiction. Welsh fiction in English began in the nineteenth century and flourished in the twentieth. The first phase explored Wales from an English viewpoint but after that south Wales writers more honestly realized their turbulent industrial world. The third phase, after World War II, involved an increasing emphasis on the independence of this small but complex country and integration between Welsh‐language and English‐language cultures. Recently, in the major centers, urban literature has come into its own, focusing on the personal and social tensions evident at the start of the twenty‐first century.
W
orld
W
ar
II
in Fiction
Authors: Decoste Damon Marcel
Published: August 2017

Less studied than World War I literature, British fiction of World War II nonetheless constitutes a discrete moment in the literary history of the last century. Rather than soldiers detailing grim disillusion in combat, the fiction of the Second War focuses on civilians and the home front as the true agents and battleground of this even more comprehensive conflict. This fiction is marked by the anxious anticipation of war, the transposition of both frontier and enemy to the home front, the emptiness of victory, and an equation of history with warfare that produces expectations of more war to come. The merits of this story, more often dismissed than analyzed, have only very recently been recognized. Calder (1969) denies that the war produced memorable fiction, a position adopted as axiomatic by various critics (Hewison 1977; Fussell 1989). Munton's (1989) groundbreaking monograph initiated a series of challenges to these assessments, but whether this fiction will yet figure so prominently in accounts of the twentieth century as its Great War counterpart remains to be seen.
A
cker,
K
athy
Authors: Rice Doug
Published: August 2017

Labeled postmodern, plagiarized, literary terrorism, Kathy Acker's writing disturbs commonly held assumptions about literary aesthetics and political power. Her writing is diseased – a foreign narrative body that undermines institutional structures for reading. More than posing metafictional conundrums, Acker's writing explores the politics of women's bodies and desires as they have been situated inside the patriarchal gaze of late market capital. More importantly, Acker's rewriting of literary history provides daughters with treasure maps for escaping the stranglehold of language designed to domesticate young girls.
A
gee,
J
ames
Authors: Nieland Justus
Published: August 2017

The cult of James Agee – poet, novelist, journalist, film critic, screenwriter, and co‐creator of
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
(1941), one of the single most remarkable and radical texts of the twentieth century – began shortly after his death from a heart attack in 1955. Two years later, his lyrical autobiographical novel,
A Death in the Family
, was published; it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1958. In the same year,
Agee on Film
appeared, and a second volume followed in 1960. These landmark collections of Agee's eccentric and brilliant film criticism would prove decisive for the mid‐century transformation of film's cultural status in the US from mere entertainment or big business to the century's most vital and aesthetically promising medium. In 1960,
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
(1941), a “nonfictional” account of Depression‐era Alabama tenant farmers, was reissued for the first time since its initial publication, when it had sold a meager 600 copies. At the dawn of the US Civil Rights Movement, the book was enthusiastically rediscovered by a new generation moved by Agee and Walker Evans's intermedial experiment in the limits of human sympathy and the extremes of suffering. Agee's literary significance today lies in his success in testing the aesthetic and political potential of a uniquely rhythmic, poetic prose. Agee's passionate, often hallucinatory style (what he once called “amphibious”) exploded conventional aesthetic boundaries, blurring documentary realism, surrealist automatism, and modernist psychological interiority, and turning lyrical prose into finely wrought, synaesthetic experiments in aurality and visuality.
Algren,Nelson
Authors: Savage Bill
Published: August 2017

Nelson Algren began his writing career in the depths of the Great Depression. Like many writers of his generation, he had been radicalized, and he set out to write literature which would enable people to see, and change, the world. But the world changed in a different direction, and his career was derailed by the rightward drift of American literary politics, and so despite his many accomplishments, he remains an outsider in American literature, often recalled more for his affair with Simone de Beauvoir than for literary accomplishments.
The Avant Garde Novel
Authors: Miller Tyrus
Published: August 2017

The term “avant garde” is typically applied to works of writing in reference to individual writers or groups of artists oriented toward a programmatically defined artistic movement, and especially toward one of the competing “isms” (e.g., cubism, futurism, or surrealism) that proliferated from the early twentieth century on. This orientation toward a movement, or at least toward a definite theoretical and ideological position expressed by their artistic activity, implies that certain genres of literature, seen as more suited to avant garde functions, have tended to be favored over others by these writers. For example, as critics such as Marjorie Perloff, Janet Lyon, and Martin Puchner have demonstrated, the new genre of “manifesto” appeared tailor‐made, both formally and rhetorically, to express the avant garde's provocative, activist aspirations. In addition, since avant gardes typically, at least at their outset, stand in a marginal, oppositional relation toward mainstream literature and its institutions, they have usually had to make use of publication venues with limited readerships and little hope of commercial support, such as the small press, the little magazine, and the chapbook. Both for intrinsic and extrinsic reasons, literary avant gardes have above all favored brief, immediate, and more rapidly produced forms such as the manifesto and the lyric poem, as well as forms of theater and performance that can be staged or published at little expense, and that directly affect their audience without further mediation or delay. Because of its length, the long duration of its production, its solid tradition of conventions, its relatively great expense for publisher and reader, and its indirect communication through fictive “worlds,” the novel has thus often been seen as too unwieldy, too mediated, and too expensive to be well adapted to literary avant gardism.
B
anks,
R
ussell
Authors: Hutchison Anthony
Published: August 2017

Born in New Hampshire in 1940, Russell Banks has risen from humble blue‐collar origins to become an increasingly prominent figure in American letters. Having left college after a few months in 1959, Banks headed south with the intention of joining Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra mountains but wound up staying in Florida, where he accumulated much of the experience – of divorce, alcoholism, and violence – that would form the basis of his early fiction.
Border Fictions
Authors: Sadowski‐Smith Claudia
Published: August 2017

The existence of fictional representations of US national boundaries can be traced back to the very creation of hemispheric borders in the nineteenth century. But the production of fiction about US national boundaries has surged at the turn of the twenty‐first century in the context of dramatic changes in this geography. As defined here, border fiction encompasses narrative productions about US borders that are set at the seams of the United States and one of its neighboring nations. Because its border settings are so closely interlinked with its subject matter, this fiction could not easily be moved to another place without distortion or loss of significance. Border texts thus illustrate the mutual constituency of a particular place and its representation – just as depictions of border regions are affected by the specificities of the geopolitical boundary, the border landscape itself is also shaped by human projection and (often contesting) representations.
Elkin,Stanley
Authors: Bailey Peter J.
Published: August 2017

If being a “writer's writer” meant not selling many books, Stanley Elkin wasn't interested. It was the expansiveness of his imagination and his delight in producing “fierce language” that made him a writer so widely admired and celebrated by his literary contemporaries but that, simultaneously, reduced his accessibility to a popular audience. His reputation as “America's funniest serious writer” increased his appeal, but Elkin maintained that producing schtick never was his major objective in writing fiction. He was drawn primarily toward “creating a palimpsest of metaphor right there on the page … That's where the fun of writing is for me… What I enjoy about fiction – the great gift of fiction – is that it gives language an opportunity to happen” (Bernt & Bernt 16). Between 1964, when he publishedBoswell: A Modern Comedy, hisfirst novel, and 1995, when Mrs. TedBlissappeared, Elkin published 14 works of fiction and an essay collection,Pieces of Soap, all of which gave language extravagant opportunities to happen.
Erdrich,Louise
Authors: Peterson Nancy J.
Published: August 2017

Louise Erdrich's compelling portrayal of contemporary urban and reservation Ojibwe characters has earned her a central place in the Native American literary renaissance that began in 1969, when N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa) won the Pulitzer Prize and inspired a generation of Native writers. From 1984 to 2008, Erdrich has published 12 novels, two memoirs, three volumes of poetry, as well as three young‐adult novels and a picture book geared for younger readers. Erdrich is a prolific and accomplished chronicler of stories involving Ojibwe characters and their neighbors, on and off the reservation, and she is also highly regarded as a stylist, noted for the lyrical prose rhythms of her novels.
E
ugenides,
J
effrey
Authors: O'Donnell Patrick
Published: August 2017

A writer attentive to the eccentricities and hazards of middle‐class life and coming of age in America, Jeffrey Eugenides is the author of two novels and a spate of short stories that have catapulted him into visibility as one of the premiere young novelists of the post‐1980 generation. Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1960 and raised in the affluent suburb of Grosse Point, Eugenides attended Brown University as an undergraduate (where as an aspiring writer he would have encountered John Hawkes and Robert Coover), and received the MFA in creative writing from Stanford University. He currently resides with his wife and daughter in Princeton, New Jersey.
F
ord,
R
ichard
Authors: Guagliardo Huey
Published: August 2017

Richard Ford ranks as a major figure among American writers of the post‐World War II generation. Ford's works of fiction repeatedly explore issues of human loneliness, isolation, and despair; and his characters, typically caught up in the absurd violence and randomness of existence in the postmodern world, experience dislocation and marginalization as they struggle to forge connections with other human beings on the lonely edge of life. Ford's project, thus, clearly places him in the tradition of the existential literature of alienation. As astute observations of contemporary society and its peculiar afflictions, his narratives of alienation also invite examination in a cultural context.
G
ass,
W
illiam
H
.
Authors: Ziegler Heide
Published: August 2017

William H. Gass is an acclaimed essayist, novelist, and short fiction writer. His writing ideal – “Write so as to become primary” – denotes the special quality of
all
of his texts (2006, 33). His work can superficially be classified according to the categories mentioned above, but they tacitly erode all genres from within. Unremittingly following Ezra Pound's modernist philosophical rule to “make it new,” Gass describes himself as a late modernist; founded upon a radical formalist aesthetic, his work contests much in the postmodern worldview, including many of its anti‐formal assumptions.
Gilman,CharlottePerkins
Authors: Thrailkill Jane F.
Published: August 2017

Despite a life span (1860–1935) roughly coinciding with that of Sigmund Freud, the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman's abiding interest was in thephysiologyof everyday life – the impingements of work and play on human nerves, muscles, and brain. Her focus on the body makes Gilman's work startlingly apt in a twenty‐first‐century culture more congenial to neuroscience than psychoanalysis. A poet, writer, activist, publisher, and major figure on the lecture circuit during the Progressive era, Gilman advocated a practical feminism (she called ithumanism)that stitched together domestic theory, socialist economics, and the new evolutionary biology. In her fiction as well as her social philosophy, she turned a naturalist's eye to the paradoxes of modern life: pampered children sickened by a “civilized” diet of unwholesome food, refined men and women whose “stone age” domestic arrangements left them exhausted and depleted, and upstanding husbands whose unpaid wives and mothers were locked in a “sexuo‐economic” relation in which they bartered human affection for financial support (1998 [1898], 142). As did her literary contemporaries Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Edith Wharton, Gilman anatomized the forces that battered human beings and sculpted their fates. Unlike other writers of naturalist fiction, however, Gilman focused on the environmental forces close to – indeed,in –the home that took their toll on the human organism. Her social philosophy and literary practice were tempered by an unshakable conviction that human beings had the power to modify and improve upon what she called “our androcentric culture.”
Gold,Mike
Authors: Roessel David
Published: August 2017

In his essay “Toward Proletarian Literature,” Mike Gold declared, “I am not an individual; I am all that the tenement group poured into me during those early years of my spiritual travail” (Folsom 65). The claim summarizes Gold's own artistic approach and the critical stance he would adopt toward the writing of others. In his view, the new socialist and revolutionary author spoke not as an intellectual, but for the collective. Art was a weapon to be used in the class struggle, and while skill was indeed important, artistic excellence without a commitment to communal values was simply introspective navel‐gazing. Some have taken Gold as an unreflective voice of the Communist Party line. But Gold gravitated to socialism and then communism because of their similarity to the shared life of the tenement that was in his blood.
H
emingway,
E
rnest
Authors: Strychacz Thomas
Published: August 2017

No writer of the twentieth century can match Ernest Hemingway's charisma. War hero, war reporter, big‐game hunter, bullfighting aficionado, celebrity expatriate, bestselling author, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 – for 30 years, “Papa” Hemingway found ways to place a series of iconic roles and images before the American public. But few writers can match Hemingway's impressive range of literary accomplishments either. The Nobel Prize committee, in its remarks, celebrated him for the “influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.” The committee was correct. He was a key figure in the development of American literary modernism, creator of a terse, minimalist style virtually synonymous with his name. He fathered a distinctively American school of “hard‐boiled” fiction, whose practitioners, from Dashiell Hammett to Elmore Leonard, feature tough prose and tight‐lipped men. Perhaps most remarkably, half a century after his death Hemingway's posthumously published writing has provoked new appraisals of what had long seemed
the
obvious interpretation of his work: that it was mostly engaged with men and their tough, lonely pursuit of manhood.
LeGuin,UrsulaK.
Authors: Rochelle Warren G.
Published: August 2017

Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the most critically acclaimed and influential writers of the twentieth century. Her prolific career includes utopian and feminist science fiction, fantasy, poetry, criticism, and mainstream fiction. She has produced 23 novels, 10 short story collections, 11 volumes of poetry, four translations, four works of criticism, 12 children's books, one screenplay, and three prose chapbooks, and has edited or coedited four anthologies.
L
ewis,
S
inclair
Authors: Hutchisson James M.
Published: August 2017

In many ways, Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) was the prophet of his generation. In an amazingly productive 10‐year period, the 1920s, Lewis produced five classic novels that satirized American society and questioned entrenched American values. He systematically worked his way through the pantheon of American myths, from the piety of the small town to the sanctity of the church, smashing shibboleths left and right and permanently lodging an element of cynicism and doubt in the American imagination. Although Lewis's star began to fall as literary experimentation started to replace old‐fashioned narrative, the topics that he tackled with his blend of realism and satire still resonate today. Indeed, he gave the words “Main Street” and “Babbitt” – the titles of his two most important novels – special meanings which they still possess.
McC
arthy,
M
ary
Authors: Murphy Brenda
Published: August 2017

During her lifetime, Mary McCarthy was known first as a public intellectual, the “First Lady of American Letters” (
Newsweek
1963), and second as a novelist. Since her death in 1989, McCarthy's critical reputation has largely been based on her memoirs, particularly
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
(1957), as well as her novel
The Group
(1963a) and several much‐anthologized stories.
M
omaday,
N
.
S
cott
Authors: Douglas Christopher
Published: August 2017

N. Scott Momaday is one of the most important Native American writers to emerge since the 1960s. His novels, autobiographical writings, and poetry reflect his Kiowa heritage and the geography of the Southwest. Frequently using mixed‐genre writing, his work emphasizes the creative power of language, the communal acts of storytelling, and the ongoing search for identity.
M
orrison,
T
oni
Authors: Bryant Cedric Gael
Published: August 2017

Is it possible “to get some place where the love is generous?” Toni Morrison inquires in “‘Things We Find in Language’” (Taylor‐Guthrie 171). This passionate question is present from the beginning of Morrison's literary career and thematically informs the fiction and non‐fiction she has produced over 40 years of “playing in the dark,” the title of her 1992 collection of essays meditating on race and the American literary imagination. After completing her third novel,
Song of Solomon
(1977), Morrison expressed the multilayered ways that love and survival form the woof and warp of her writing in this way: “I think that I still write about the same thing, which is how people relate to one another and miss it or hang on to it … or are tenacious about love. About love and how to survive – not to make a living – but how to survive
whole
where we are all of us, in some measure,
victims
of
something”
(Taylor‐Guthrie 30).
Naturalist Fiction
Authors: Dudley John
Published: August 2017

Famously dismissed by Malcolm Cowley and other critics as little more than “pessimistic determinism,” American literary naturalism might more fully be described as an attempt to incorporate the revolutionary scientific ideas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into an American literary tradition already heavily invested in questions of free will and individualism. At its center, naturalist fiction is concerned with understanding the limits placed upon an individual by forces beyond his or her control. While generally viewed as the culmination of the realist turn in American art and literature that began after the US Civil War, the naturalist movement, with its incorporation of scientific discourse, its exploration of individual consciousness, its experimentation with form and technique, and its attention to issues of racial and gendered difference, should also be seen as laying the groundwork for questions of subjectivity, epistemology, and ethics so crucial to modernism and postmodernism. Always engaged with contemporaneous social, political, and intellectual issues, naturalism as a fictional mode continued to evolve in response to, and along with, the myriad cultural changes of the twentieth century.