Schaub presents American fiction in the political climate of its time. Through the 1930s, he portrays authors as typically left of center and becoming disillusioned with communism as a result of Stalin's purges and his nonaggression pact with Hitler. Subsequent authors embraced a His general discussion comes to focus on the works of Barth, O'Connor, Ellison, and Mailer. Paper edition (unseen), $12.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

In this remarkable book, Tony Hilfer provides a major survey of the wealth of post-war American fiction. He analyses the major modes and genres of writing, from realist to postmodernist metafiction and black humour, the fiction of social protest, women's writing, and the traditions of African-American, Southern and Jewish-American fiction. Key writers discussed include William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Vladimir Nabokov and Joyce Carol Oates. The book concludes by exploring contemporary trends through detailed case-studies of Donald Barthelme and Toni Morrison.

The #1 New York Times–bestselling classic: A hilarious memoir of two parents, twelve kids, and “a life of cheerfully controlled chaos” (The New York Times). Translated into more than fifty languages, Cheaper by the Dozen is the unforgettable story of the Gilbreth clan as told by two of its members. In this endearing, amusing memoir, siblings Frank Jr. and Ernestine capture the hilarity and heart of growing up in an oversized family. Mother and Dad are world-renowned efficiency experts, helping factories fine-tune their assembly lines for maximum output at minimum cost. At home, the Gilbreths themselves have cranked out twelve kids, and Dad is out to prove that efficiency principles can apply to family as well as the workplace. The heartwarming and comic stories of the jumbo-size Gilbreth clan have delighted generations of readers, and will keep you and yours laughing for years. This ebook features an illustrated biography including rare photos from the authors’ estates.

America's post–World War II prosperity created a boom in higher education, expanding the number of university-educated readers and making a new literary politics possible. Writers began to direct their work toward the growing professional class, and the American public in turn became more open to literary culture. This relationship imbued fiction with a new social and cultural import, allowing authors to envision themselves as unique cultural educators. It also changed the nature of literary representation: writers came to depict social reality as a tissue of ideas produced by knowledge elites. Linking literary and historical trends, Stephen Schryer underscores the exalted fantasies that arose from postwar American writers' new sense of their cultural mission. Hoping to transform capitalism from within, writers and critics tried to cultivate aesthetically attuned professionals who could disrupt the narrow materialism of the bourgeoisie. Reading Don DeLillo, Marge Piercy, Mary McCarthy, Saul Bellow, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ralph Ellison, and Lionel Trilling, among others, Schryer unravels the postwar idea of American literature as a vehicle for instruction, while highlighting both the promise and flaws inherent in this vision.

"A fine example of politically engaged literary criticism.--Belles Lettres "Price Herndl's compelling individual readings of works by major writers (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Hawthorne, Wharton, James, Fitzgerald) and minor ones complement her examination of germ theory, psychic and somatic cures, medicine's place in the rise of capitalism, and the cultural forms in which men and women used the trope of female illness.--Choice "A rich and provocative study of female illnesses and their textual representations. . . . A major contribution to the feminist agenda of literature and medicine.--Medical Humanities Review "[An] important book.--Nineteenth-Century Literature "[This] sophisticated new study . . . brings the best current strategies of a thoroughly historicized feminist literary criticism to bear on textual representations of female invalidism.--Feminist Studies "An outstanding study of the representation of female invalidism in American culture and literature. There emerges from this work a striking sense of the changing meanings of female invalidism even as the conjunction of these terms has remained a constant in American cultural history. . . . Moreover, Invalid Women provides fascinating readings of female illness in a variety of texts.--Gillian Brown, University of Utah "A provocative study based on imaginative historical research and very fine close readings. The book provides a useful American complement to Helena Michie's The Flesh Made Word and Margaret Homans's Bearing the World. It should prove enlightening and otherwise useful not just to scholars of American literature, but also to those engaged in American studies, feminist criticism and theory, women's studies, the sociology of medicine and illness, and the history of science and medicine.--Cynthia S. Jordan, Indiana University