The four essays in this 1991 volume discuss approaches to Sister Carrie.

"In 1919, having recently accepted the publishing contract of a new publisher, Dreiser proposed to publish a "book of characters" that would collect twelve biographical sketches of individuals who were major influences on Dreiser, both as a man and as a writer. The resulting narratives combine the best attributes of the character sketch, the autobiography, and the short story into miniature masterpieces of prose. The men profiled in Twelve Men are a diverse and colorful group: from Dreiser's equally famous brother, the song-writer Paul Dreiser's ("My Brother Paul"), to the entirely obscure railroad foreman Michael Burke ("The Mighty Rourke"), on whose work crew Dreiser had labored in 1903. The twelve narratives are compelling portraits of the men portrayed, but they also reveal many insights into Dreiser's own life and work."--Goodreads website.

A Study Guide for Theodore Dreiser's "Sister Carrie," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

The American A social comedy about Christopher Newman, an American businessman on his first tour of Europe. Along the way, he finds a widow from an aristocratic French family.

The specially commissioned essays collected in this volume establish new parameters for both scholarly and classroom discussion of Dreiser. This Companion provides fresh perspectives on the frequently read classics, Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, as well as on topics of perennial interest, such as Dreiser's representation of the city and his prose style. The volume investigates topics such as his representation of masculinity and femininity, and his treatment of ethnicity. It is the most comprehensive introduction to Dreiser's work available.

Theodore Dreiser is indisputably one of America's most important twentieth-century novelists. An American Tragedy, Sister Carrie, and Jennie Gerhardt have all made an indelible mark on the American literary landscape. And yet, remarkably few critical books and no recent collections of critical essays have been published that attempt to answer current theoretical questions about Dreiser's entire canon. This collection is the first to appear in twenty-four years. The ten contributing essayists offer original interpretations of Dreiser's works from such disparate points of view as new historicism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism, film studies, and canon formation. A vital reassessment, Theodore Dreiser: Beyond Naturalism brings this influential modern writer into the 1990s by viewing him through the lens of the latest literary theory and cultural criticism.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American authors pioneered a mode of musical writing that quite literally resounded beyond the printed page. Novels gained soundtracks, poetry compelled its audiences to sing, and the ostensibly silent act of reading became anything but. The Great American Songbooks is the story of this literature, at once an overview of musical and authorial practice at the century's turn, an investigation into the sensory dimensions of reading, and a meditation on the effects that the popular arts have had on literary modernism. The writings of John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Walt Whitman are heard in a new key; the performers and tunesmiths who inspired them have their stories told; and the music of the past, long out of print and fashion, is recapitulated and made available in digital form. A work of criticism situated at the crossroads of literary analysis, musicology, and cultural history, The Great American Songbooks demonstrates the importance of studying fiction and poetry from interdisciplinary perspectives, and it suggests new avenues for research in the dawning age of the digital humanities.

When The Awakening was first published in 1899 it was an extraordinarily controversial book. One of the first American novels to concern itself with themes of adultery and divorce, it was widely attacked as 'vulgar' and 'unhealthy'. In her introduction to this collection, Wendy Martin discusses the historical background of the novel and analyses the heroine's evolution from a role of traditional femininity to one of autonomous individualism. The essays that follow explore other central themes of the novel, as well as locating Chopin in the tradition of American women novelists and discussing her status as a pre-modernist writer.

Presenting a revisionary reading of German, Canadian, and American texts such as Fanny Essler, Settlers of the Marsh, and Sister Carrie, Gammel (English, U. of Prince Edward Island) attributes to naturalism, a predominantly male genre, the appropriation of a disruptive female sexuality not so much to "liberate" it from Victorian repression as to contain it within the male boundaries of naturalism. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Part I examines the ethos of self-making and boosterism that has defined the city since its settlement in the 1830s, and argues that these energies formed the context for hinterland migration during the nineteenth century and beyond. Part 2 highlights the emotional and cultural foraces that continued to tie many migrants to the hinterland even after their arrival in Chicago. Part 3 looks at Chicago's ethnic communities through the eyes of hinterland migrants, underscoring the cultural authority of these native-born newcomers in mediating the assimilation of foreign immigrants. Chapter 6 focuses on the work of Jane Addams and Chapter 7 considers how Chicago's multiethnic community is portrayed in Edith Wyatt's and Elia Peattie's fiction and in Carl Sandburg's poetry.