PoMo petrifaction has entered into contemporary fiction in an interesting way. Those American writers associated with the postmodern—John Earth, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, John Hawkes, William Gaddis, and so on—are all well over 40...
We like to think of the law as providing the comfort of fairness and certainty. This is a story about the uncomfortable way law is made in America and the resulting elusiveness of certainty and fairness in our law. The course this...
Grant Webster provides a detailed account of the New Critics and the New York Intellectuals; and he supplements these central sections of his book by analyzing the nature of critical schools and by supplying an excellent bibliography and...
Although Freud started out as a heretic in terms of established psychology and medical practice, he gained an almost hypnotic effect on his followers and succeeded in establishing an orthodoxy which exerts its power even today, almost 40...
James McBride Dabbs wrote, “Of all the Americans, the Southerner is the most at home in the world. Or at least in the South, which, because of its very at-homeness, he is apt to confuse with the world.” One might see here a nascent...
Recently, historians have sought to understand how and why Americans continue to remember their civil war. Memory of the bloodiest conflict on U.S. soil remains fresh in popular imagination, kept alive by legions of Civil War buffs...
When he came of age, Thomas Jefferson inherited considerable property from his father in Albemarle County, Virginia, and he chose a site not far from Shadwell, his birthplace, as the seat of his own estate. He called it “Monticello,”...