Literature teems with images of the social outcast from a variety of times and cultures as it seeks to examine and reveal motivating factors that drive intolerance. Drawing from studies of American southern culture through shifting time periods, this thesis provides a historical backdrop as it explores specific social outcasts depicted in Bette Greene's novels Summer of My German Solder, Morning Is A Long Time Coming and The Drowning of Stephan Jones. Through the history and settings of the novels, Greene provides significant cultural information through which the actions of her characters can be analyzed. Alienation, bullying and discrimination are prominent factors as they relate to the idea of the social outcast. Current interest and research into the plight of the social outcast reveals that human beings are socially dependent creatures who have a strong need for acceptance and that those targeted for social exclusion are often confused and devastated by their ostracism. Greene does an excellent job of illustrating this need for acceptance as she explores the vulnerability of the social outcast and the dangers that discrimination and bullying pose to society as a whole. Greene, who herself was bullied and discriminated against as a child, uses her writing to bring awareness to her young readers about this timely and important subject. Using material collected from a personal interview with the author, close readings of her novels, and research on relevant social/historical contexts, this thesis examines the rendering of the social outcast in Greene's fiction and the effects that social ostracism has on the individual.

When the train pulls into the station in Jenkensville, Arkansas, Patty Bergen senses something exciting is going to happen. German prisoners of war have arrived to make their new home in the prison camp. To the rest of the town these prisoners are only Nazis, but to Patty, a young Jewish girl with a turbulent home life, one of the young soldiers becomes an unlikely friend. Anton understands her in a way her parents never could and Patty is willing to lose her own family, friends and even freedom for a boy who becomes the most important part of her life.

Carla Wayland feels like the happiest girl in the world-her longtime crush, star quarterback Andy Harris, seems to feel the same way about her. Around them, the country is erupting with arguments and demonstrations both for and against gay rights. But Carla certainly doesn't know anyone who is gay, not in her small hometown of Rachetville, Arkansas. While everyone says homosexuality is a sin, Carla doesn't know what to think. But her mother, the town librarian, always stands up for what she knows is right, even when it isn't popular, and Carla loves her for that. Then Frank Montgomery and Stephan Jones, a gay couple, move into town. Tempers flare, and the town's friendly residents-led by the Baptist preacher, Reverend Roland Wheelwright-soon show their true colors. Carla is horrified, but even Andy seems to agree that homosexuality is an abomination, to be wiped out. When Andy and his friends take their cause a little too far, will Carla be able to defy the majority and speak up for justice?

A landmark work from the author of Orientalism that explores the long-overlooked connections between the Western imperial endeavor and the culture that both reflected and reinforced it. "Grandly conceived . . . urgently written and urgently needed. . . . No one studying the relations between the metropolitan West and the decolonizing world can ignore Mr. Said's work.' --The New York Times Book Review In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the Western powers built empires that stretched from Australia to the West Indies, Western artists created masterpieces ranging from Mansfield Park to Heart of Darkness and Aida. Yet most cultural critics continue to see these phenomena as separate. Edward Said looks at these works alongside those of such writers as W. B. Yeats, Chinua Achebe, and Salman Rushdie to show how subject peoples produced their own vigorous cultures of opposition and resistance. Vast in scope and stunning in its erudition, Culture and Imperialism reopens the dialogue between literature and the life of its time.

The central thesis of this book is that a genre approach provides the most effective means for understanding, analyzing and appreciating the Hollywood cinema. Taking into account not only the formal and aesthetic aspects of feature filmmaking, but various other cultural aspects as well, the genre approach treats movie production as a dynamic process of exchange between the film industry and its audience. This process, embodied by the Hollywood studio system, has been sustained primarily through genres, those popular narrative formulas like the Western, musical and gangster film, which have dominated the screen arts throughout this century.

This book argues that McCarthy’s works convey a profound moral vision, and use intertextuality, moral philosophy, and questions of genre to advance that vision. It focuses upon the ways in which McCarthy’s fiction is in ceaseless conversation with literary and philosophical tradition, examining McCarthy’s investment in influential thinkers from Marcus Aurelius to Hannah Arendt, and poets, playwrights, and novelists from Dante and Shakespeare to Fyodor Dostoevsky and Antonio Machado. The book shows how McCarthy’s fiction grapples with abiding moral and metaphysical issues: the nature and problem of evil; the idea of God or the transcendent; the credibility of heroism in the modern age; the question of moral choice and action; the possibility of faith, hope, love, and goodness; the meaning and limits of civilization; and the definition of what it is to be human. This study will appeal alike to readers, teachers, and scholars of Cormac McCarthy.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FINALIST • Set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse—the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity. • Now an original series on HBO Max. • Over one million copies sold! One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end. Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed. Look for Emily St. John Mandel’s bestselling new novel, Sea of Tranquility!