An existential murder mystery about two rival writers willing to do anything—lie, steal, kill—to get the perfect story.

A Confederate soldier confronts the horror of battle and the power of grace in this “poignant, haunting, and important” novel of the Civil War (The Tennessean, Nashville). A New York Times Notable Book and Winner of the William Boyd Award for Best Military Novel In November 1864, Gen. John Bell Hood’s Army of Tennessee prepares to launch an assault on Union forces near Franklin, Tennessee. Dirty, exhausted, and hungry, the Confederate soldiers form a line of battle across an open field. Among them stands Pvt. Bushrod Carter, a twenty-six-year-old rifleman from Cumberland, Mississippi. Against all odds, Bushrod has survived three years of war unscathed—but his luck is about to run out. Wounded in the battle, Bushrod is taken to a makeshift hospital on a nearby plantation. There, he falls under the care of Anna Hereford, who bears her own scars from years of relentless bloodshed and tragedy. In the grisly aftermath of one of the Confederate army’s most disastrous campaigns, Anna and Bushrod seek salvation and understanding in each other. Their fragile bond carries with it the hope of a life beyond the war, and the risk of a pain too devastating to endure. Written with profound empathy and meticulous attention to historical detail, The Black Flower brilliantly portrays the staggering human toll of America’s bloodiest conflict. In his award-winning debut novel, “Howard Bahr casts a tale of war as powerful as any you’ll ever find” (Southern Living).

A recurrent idea in Darrel Abel's criticism of the works of Hawthorne gives this volume its title. The idea of a fallen world and its potential for partial redemption through art and the art of criticism is a theme that weaves in and out of the sixteen essays. The volume as a whole displays an explicit and implicit concern with critical approaches and reflects an awareness of the fictiveness of critical resolutions in a world in which boundaries are constantly under challenge, for example, those which divide "textuality" from "contextuality." This collection of essays explores the problems the practical critic and teacher has had to face in the shifts in taste, assumptions, and methodology in the moves from moral and historical criticism to the "New Criticism," and to the newer linguistic and semiotic criticism.

This book takes issue with the tendency in twentieth-century Hawthorne-criticism to blur the distinction between symbolism and allegory. Rejecting the long-standing notion that Hawthorne is a symbolist in allegorical disguise, Ullén argues that allegory is the key to understanding how religion, sexuality, aesthetics and politics are interwoven in Hawthorne's writings. The study presents a model for allegorical interpretation of general applicability, which is brought to bear on each of Hawthorne's mature romances, and on the oft-neglected Wonder Books written for children. An unparalleled analysis of the formal intricacies of Hawthorne's writings, this book is an eloquent plea for the necessity of grounding ideological analysis in aesthetical considerations.

No detailed description available for "Narcissus and the Voyeur".

The Net of Nemesis examines the trope of tragic bond/age, in which humanity is the beneficiary of bonds that nurture and unite and the victim of bondage that confines and restrains. Manifestations of the trope in Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, Miltonic epic, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction repeat and vary the trope's central symbol of the net and other, related leitmotifs and demonstrate that such orchestration resolves the conflict between bonds and bond/age and informs the catharsis and transcendence essential to tragedy.

This book serves to feed human nature with both a religious and literary mood. It may bring the reader a little closer to an understanding of life's complexities, or it may challenge the reader's own philosophical self, as he or she discovers the unraveling of Hawthorne's. The editor of the book, which has been composed from his memory of an unknown student's work, claims to have unearthed a rare discovery that may unveil a mystery that has puzzled the best of minds in the literary field for many years. In the words of its author, his purpose is clear: "I have thought to publish my interpretations of Hawthorne's novel so that those critics in the field of literature, who will, may have additional cause for which to expound their intelligence, either in trying to better understand this mystery, or to salvage the old cherished ambiguities by which the public brain is presently intoxicated. If I am correct in only a few of my impressions, hopefully the main ones, we shall have to reappraise Hawthorne as a literary prophet who hoped for and predicted a future time when mankind would look more favorable upon the creation, man." Both the author and editor send the reader on a journey into the mind and heart of an American icon which have too long been misunderstood and underappreciated. He asks the reader to drink deep from the depths of his or her own intuitive awakenings, and encourages each to rediscover the man who created The Scarlet Letter. In so doing, one may see the vexations and conflicts in his own life as a "dark necessity" to be endured, as in the character of his beloved Hester, who speaks to the heart of every human, and in behalf of our own human nature.