In the wake of Ionesco's death in 1994, it is now possible to survey his oeuvre in its entirety. Gaensbauer's study examines, decade by decade, not only his dramatic works but also his early publications in Romania, his journals and personal essays, and even his painting. In viewing Ionesco's career as a continuous whole, Gaensbauer discovers that each work is essentially one piece of the long autobiography of a writer deeply engaged with a spiritual quest to understand himself and humanity.

In this astute and learned analysis of McCarthy's fiction, Robert Jarrett looks at all seven of the novels published to date and responds to much of the current (and proliferating) critical thought about McCarthy. After an introductory biographical chapter, Jarrett addresses what he considers the two phases of McCarthy's fiction: as a regional writer of the Appalachian South, whose work mixes modernist and realistic techniques and merges contemporary fiction with the tradition of Southern literature (as in The Orchard Keeper [1965], Outer Dark [1968], Child of God [1973], and Suttree [1979]), and as a bold experimenter in form and style, with a keenly rendered postmodern esthetic (as in Blood Meridian [1985], All the Pretty Horses, and The Crossing [1994]). Jarrett regards McCarthy's early novels as attempts to write a modern fiction of the twentieth-century Tennessee hill country, comparable to what local-color realists or regionalists accomplished in the nineteenth century and to what William Faulkner accomplished in his mixture of modernism and regionalism in his Yoknapatawpha fiction. It is during his second phase, Jarrett points out, that the locales of McCarthy's novels shift to the Southwest, and any appearance they give of being popular westerns becomes only a disguise. In the final chapter Jarrett stresses three distinctive aspects of McCarthy's fiction: the diverse and idiosyncratic style of the narrative discourse, the central theme of the quest undertaken through a visionary landscape, and the role of interpolated tales. Drawing keenly on literary theory to synthesize the various strands of McCarthy's unique narrative voice, Jarrett concludes that while the author's tales -often steeped in violence - may not tell us what we want to hear, the enduring pleasure of his novels lies in their imaginative and stylistic power.

"Louise Fitzhugh, a major innovator in realistic fiction for children, stunned the book world with her challenging 1964 novel Harriet the Spy. An individualist who satirized conformity in all her books--among them Sport, Nobody's Family Is Going to Change, and Bang, Bang, You're Dead--Fitzhugh created memorable protagonists who consistently resist deadening familial and societal conventions. Although her novels celebrate independence and self-knowledge, the absence of intimacy in Fitzhugh's fictional world also suggests the tragedy of individualism; her work thus serves as a subtle critique of contemporary American society, where neither outsider nor conformist is truly happy." "In this first book-length study of Fitzhugh's published works, Virginia L. Wolf introduces new biographical information and explores the complex relationship between Fitzhugh's life and art. Wolf enhances our understanding of the homosexual artist by tracing the autobiographical sources of Fitzhugh's major themes and inspirations: alienation, the family, individualism, conformity, religion, war, and bigotry. In this careful examination of Fitzhugh's feminism and lesbianism, Wolf emphasizes the revolutionary, iconoclastic positions championed by Fitzhugh and her characters. These hitherto unexamined issues provide a unique new insight into Fitzhugh's accomplishments and further our understanding of her contribution to children's literature."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved