The book explains the novel's connection with the American South of the 1920s, illuminating its modernist style and exploring its autobiographical elements. After surveying criticism on the novel, the book examines the theme that dominates the work: the changes occuring in Southern race, class and gender definitions.

This non-academic author has previously brought you reader's guides to the depths and subtle pleasures of works by Joyce and Faulkner. With this book he brings you to the ultimate pleasures of Gustave Flaubert's masterpiece. This author treats Madame Bovary as the Zen novel, working on the reader in the same way Zen works on a disciple. He shows how Flaubert uses a radically new style in order to create a literary breakthrough of a similar order as Zen and has composed the ultimate music of this novel in the counterpoint of style and plot. The style of the novel is grounded in Zen-like detachment and freedom whereas the plot is mired in desire, illusion and determinism. In the plot the inevitable demise of Madame Bovary is driven by her passionate nature and corresponding vulnerability to illusion. By contrast Flaubert's radical style is built on the philosophy of detachment. Flaubert finds a principal enemy of human freedom deep in the guts of mankind in the tapeworm of desire. The desire tapeworm feeds on freedom and excretes dissatisfaction. Emma or Madame Bovary is not free because she has the worm. Emma wants, Emma gets, but she is quickly dissatisfied and then the worm wants more. Emma could be a poster girl for our 21st century credit card society. Flaubert's novel shows through the fate of Emma Bovary the dangers of the worm. For those without freedom fate is in charge.

This is a detailed reader's guide to the power of Conrad's novel Victory. This non-academic author analyzes Conrad's format as a conflict between the life philosophies of Buddhist separation and Holy Spirit connection, a conflict played out dramatically in the emotional relationship of one man and one woman living on a remote south sea island. Anderson identifies the major themes as follows. Baron Axel Heyst, living alone to avoid emotional entanglements, nonetheless rescues Lena from a touring orchestra, and they escape to live together 24/7 on his remote island. Lena's connection to Heyst matures from initial interest to sexual love to selfless or spiritual love. But Heyst's response to her remains stuck in sexual possession. Given this failure of love connection, representatives of evil arrive on the island shortly thereafter. The victory of the title is Lena's victory over the fear of death that generates the selfish "me first" attitude in humans. Grounded in love for Heyst, she achieves a permanent and real sense of self and an ability to deal with evil. Finally the Holy Spirit force field powers her ultimate sacrifice for Heyst. He remains self-possessed, ultimately giving nothing of himself to Lena, but ironically without a secure sense of self or the ability to deal with evil. This author sees Conrad's large structure for Heyst's failure of the spirit as the biblical account of Mary Magdalene's part in the Resurrection of Christ. Heyst's failure to love Lena is his resurrection lost. This author also analyzes the sophisticated art of this novel as an unfolding from stem-cell metaphors into more specialized metaphors producing a powerful artistic victory.

This non-academic author, a retired lawyer, brings William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! to life as uncertainty in Dixie. He traces Faulkner's portrait of the efforts of Thomas Sutpen to create a family dynasty in wealth and community respect and of Rosa Coldfield to revenge Sutpen's treatment of her as a mere reproduction tool. Both efforts are analyzed as life sterilizers inevitably doomed to failure by the uncertainties in life and as examples of the tension between control of the future and love, a choice Faulkner had to make in his own personal life. Line by line analyses of critical portions of the novel reveal its subtleties to the reader. The explanation points out the intentional gaps and spaces in the story that invite reader participation as to what happened. This author gives you his interpretation. You are invited to create your own version of what "really" happened in this archetypal setting in Faulkner's famous Jefferson, Mississippi.

Presents critical essays reflecting a variety of schools of criticism for The sound and the fury.

This fourth in a series continues this non-academic author's ground-breaking word by word analysis of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. This volume covers all of chapters 1.7, 1.8 and 2.1 with the intent to explore them as art objects. In chapters 1.7 and 1.8 Aesthetics meets Theosophy meets Metaphysics. Together they share a common subject-how one part or whole treats another part. These two chapters move from shun to share, hurt to help, male to female. In aesthetics, from bad art to good art. In theosophy, from TZTZ god to ES god. In metaphysics a la Arthur Schopenhauer, from male to female aspects of Will. Featuring an all male cast, chapter 1.7 is a stinging criticism of Shem by Shaun-brother against brother. Chapter 1.7 is intentionally bad art. In aesthetic terms, the whole of the chapter is at odds with the parts and the parts at odds with other parts. With an all female cast, chapter 1.8 features a young washerwoman and old washerwoman washing clothes and talking together across a river. The main point is that they are working together, and Old shares knowledge of the eternal feminine with Young. Sharing replaces shunning. Part helps part. Chapter 1.8 is intentionally divine art. Chapter 2.1 starts Part II that features the Earwicker children, the human expression of the death defying new. As children, they come with the potential for new possibilities. Initially, however, their realization is limited by youth, when they are more under instinct-based and parental control than under self-control. Chapter 2.1 features a children's game fueled by immature sexual intoxication and loss of self-control. Joyce presents this come-on game in the rhythms and rhymes of children's stories, poems and songs, that is in children's art limited by the purpose to please a young mind. Chapter 2.1 takes the form of a play. The action in the play is the children's game. It is a play about play. With drama in the structure, Joyce weaves Macbeth into the chapter and like Shakespeare's bearded witches, boils the pot with male and female. Hermetic magic supplies the metaphors and concepts for chapter 2.1. Hermetic magic is the art of accessing the celestial force field known as the Astral Light. In order to have strong magic the magus must be in equilibrium and must know him or herself. Magus Joyce notes that these same requirements are necessary for the highest art.

Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald's career itself is a metaphor for the vagaries of book publishing. If Fitzgerald would have had his way, we would today refer to The Great Gatsby as either Gold-Hatted Gatsby, Trimalchio in West Egg, or The High-Bouncing Lover. A few years before Gatsby, Fitzgerald had become a literary sensation at the age of 23; Helen Hooven Santmyer, a contemporary of Fitzgerald's, would not have a successful novel published until she was 88 and living in a nursing home. In this book, the author explores that mysterious place in publishing where art and commerce can either clash, mesh, or both. Along the way, a wide range of authors--from the literary greats to today's commercial superstars--editors, agents and publishers share their thoughts, insights and experiences: What inspires writers? (John Steinbeck, for example, wrote every novel as if it were his last, as if death were imminent.) Why are some books successful and appreciated, while others fall into oblivion? The answers are often elusive, never absolute, but the stories and anecdotes are always fascinating.

An analysis of Faulkner's novel Light in August based on the death of his daughter, Alabama. BACK COVER: This non-academic author exposes the poltergeist lurking in the cellar of Faulkner's uncanny and haunting novel Light in August as the ghost of Faulkner's first child Alabama. She was born prematurely and died tragically after only nine days, apparently in the clutches of fetal alcohol syndrome. Faulkner couldn't write anything substantial for 7 months and then started this disturbing novel. The author demonstrates how Faulkner's own grief experience shaped the characters and the action and how he grounded part of his personal poltergeist in this novel. The resulting novel is full of tension and alienation. Strangers occupy Faulkner's fictional Jefferson, Mississippi against the background of the culturally reft South post-Civil War. The author shows how Faulkner shrouded his intensely personal grief experience in a conceptual wardrobe borrowed from the philosopher and Nobel Prize winning Henri Bergson. Faulkner borrowed Bergsonian concepts of the life and death currents for the contrast in characters between those free in the present and those prisoners of the past. Lena Grove the young and pregnant country girl walking for weeks to find the father of her child bears the life current and Joe Christmas the orphan turned rapist and murderer the death current. The author demonstrates how Faulkner created the novel's other vivid characters using similar contrasts and how the plot strands tie together in a resonating whole. The author's detailed textual analysis of important passages brings this difficult novel into focus. Like the author's other books on Joyce and Faulkner, use of this analysis either as literary foreplay or afterplay will enhance your reading experience of Faulkner's novel.

This non-academic author explores Conrad's classic Lord Jim as a clinic in the psychology of the self, a novel whose characters are designed to reflect various degrees of integration of self-image and action and independence from the approval of others. Conrad's character construction anticipates the findings and theories of modern psychology, particularly those of psychological differentiation and to a lesser extent Jung and Freud. The main contrast in the clinic of the self is between the independent Marlow and the dependent Jim. After Jim fails to do his duty as First Mate on a ship named the Patna, he is judged by a court of inquiry and humiliated. Pathologically subject to shame because of the lack of any secure self, the dependent Jim attempts to hide by moving from port to port and finally into the jungle in out of the way Patusan. Crowned Lord Jim by the natives, he meets a seemingly inevitable fate because of his continuing need for approval from others. The independent Marlow helps Jim and in the process develops nuanced attitudes beyond conventional morality. Anderson sees the principal art of the novel as the connection Conrad forged between Jim and the Patna. Damaged by a submerged object while carrying Muslim pilgrims on their annual pilgrimage, the cause and effect of damage to the ship are metaphors for the cause and effect of Jim's psychic damage, damage that makes him susceptible to the pressure of opinions of others. Damaged early by the lack of a mother's nurture, Jim has no strong inner bulkheads to resist the pressure of the opinions of others. This author views the background of the novel, the background against which Conrad constructed Jim's life drama, to include the Garden of Eden myth and the attitudes towards free will in Islam and Christianity. As he did with works by Joyce, Faulkner and Flaubert, Anderson gives his analysis in a chapter by chapter and selected paragraph by paragraph reading of the novel.

Faulkner scholarship is one of the largest critical enterprises currently at work. Because of its size and scope, accessing that scholarship has become difficult for scholars, students, and general readers alike. This reference includes chapters on individual approaches to Faulkner studies, including archetypal, historical, biographical, feminist, and psychological criticism, among others. Each chapter is written by an expert contributor and surveys the contributions of that approach to Faulkner scholarship. The volume concludes with a selected, general bibliography and glossary of critical terms. William Faulkner is one of the most widely read and studied American writers. His works have also generated a vast body of scholarship and elicited criticism from a wide range of approaches. Because of its size, scope, and diversity, accessing that scholarship has become difficult for scholars, students, and general readers alike. This reference comprehensively overviews the present state of Faulkner studies. The volume includes chapters written by expert contributors. Each chapter defines a particular critical approach and surveys the contributions of that approach to Faulkner studies. Some of the approaches covered are archetypal, biographical, feminist, historical, and psychological, among others. The book closes with a selected, general bibliography and glossary of critical terms.