This book demonstrates the complexity of Bellow's work by emphasizing the ways in which it reflects the changing conditions of American identity.

This volume provides newly commissioned essays from leading scholars and critics on the social and cultural history of the novel in America. It explores the work of the most influential American novelists of the past 200 years, including Melville, Twain, James, Wharton, Cather, Faulkner, Ellison, Pynchon, and Morrison.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race shows teachers and students how and why Shakespeare and race are inseparable. Moving well beyond Othello, the collection invites the reader to understand racialized discourses, rhetoric, and performances in all of Shakespeare's plays, including the comedies and histories. Race is presented through an intersectional approach with chapters that focus on the concepts of sexuality, lineage, nationality, and globalization. The collection helps students to grapple with the unique role performance plays in constructions of race by Shakespeare (and in Shakespearean performances), considering both historical and contemporary actors and directors. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race will be the first book that truly frames Shakespeare studies and early modern race studies for a non-specialist, student audience.

A COMPANION TO THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY A Companion to the American Short Story traces the development of this versatile literary genre over the past two centuries. Written by leading critics in the field, and edited by two major scholars, it explores a wide range of writers, from Edgar Allen Poe and Edith Wharton, at the end of the nineteenth century to important modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Richard Wright. Contributions with a broader focus address groups of multiethnic, Asian, and Jewish writers. Each chapter places the short story into context, focusing on the interaction of cultural forces and aesthetic principles. The Companion takes account of cutting edge approaches to literary studies and contributes to the ongoing redefinition of the American canon, embracing genres such as ghost and detective fiction, cycles of interrelated short fiction, and comic, social and political stories. The volume also reflects the diverse communities that have adopted this literary form and made it their own, featuring entries on a variety of feminist and multicultural traditions. This volume presents an important new consideration of the role of the short story in the literary history of American literature.

For more than two hundred years, Jews have played important roles in the development of American literature. The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature addresses a wide array of themes and approaches to the distinct yet multifaceted body of Jewish American literature. Essays examine writing from the 1700s to major contemporary writers such as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. Topics covered include literary history, immigration and acculturation, Yiddish and Hebrew literature, popular culture, women writers, literary theory and poetics, multilingualism, the Holocaust, and contemporary fiction. This collection of specially commissioned essays by leading figures discusses Jewish American literature in relation to ethnicity, religion, politics, race, gender, ideology, history, and ethics, and places it in the contexts of both Jewish and American writing. With its chronology and guides to further reading, this volume will prove valuable to scholars and students alike.

It's sweltering summer in New York City, and Asa Leventhal is alone. His co-workers ignore or condescend to him, his wife is away with her mother, and his estranged brother has run off, abandoning his wife and two sons. One night, Leventhal is confronted by a stranger--'one of those guys who want you to think they can see to the bottom of your soul'--who reveals himself to be a marginal figure from his distant past. Leventhal, accused of ruining the man's life, becomes shocked and dismissive, vehemently denying any part in the man's unhappy lot. But as time passes, he is increasingly unable to separate his own good fortune from the bad luck of this down-and-out stranger, who will not leave him be. A brief, haunting rumination on the vagaries of fate and responsibility, The Victim is, in the words of Norman Rush, Saul Bellow's "purest creation."

Saul Bellow: "I Was a Jew and an American and a Writer" offers a fresh and original perspective on the life and works of Saul Bellow, the Nobel Prize winner in Literature in 1976. Author Gerald Sorin emphasizes Bellow's Jewish identity as fundamental to his being and the content and meaning of his fiction. Bellow's work from the 1940s to 2000, when he wrote his last novel at the age of 84, centers on the command in Deuteronomy to "Choose life" as distinct from nihilistic withdrawal and the defense of meaninglessness. Although Bellow disdained the label of "American Jewish Writer," Sorin conjectures that he was an outstanding representative of the classification. Bellow and the characters in his fiction not only choose life but also explore what it means to live a good life, however difficult that may be to define, and regardless of how much harder it is to achieve. For Sorin, Bellow realized that at least two obstacles stood in the way: the imperfection of the world and the frailty of the human pursuer. Saul Bellow: "I Was a Jew and an American and a Writer" provides a new and insightful narrative of the life and works of Saul Bellow. By using Bellow's deeply internalized Jewishness and his remarkable imagination and creativity as a lens, Sorin examines how he captured the shifting atmosphere of postwar American culture.