ENGL 238: Introduction to Fiction

"This Norton Critical Edition is based on the 1902 English first book publication. The text comes paired with eplanatory footnotes, illustrations and photographs, and an introduction by the editor. "Backgrounds and Contexts" explores the wide range of historical attitudes that influenced the text, including essays on imperialism and the Congo, Nineteenth-Century Attitudes Toward Race, Conrad in the Congo, and The Author on Art and Literature."

"Philip Roth is unquestionably one of the major literary voices of our time, one who has combined critical acclaim with a wide readership. Since the publication of Bernard F. Rodgers's Twayne study of Roth (1978), Roth's oeuvre has expanded considerably both in bulk and in range, with the publication of such major works as The Ghost Writer, The Counterlife, and Patrimony. Philip Roth Revisited is an entirely new look at this important writer's life and work."

"A towering presence in modern literature, James Joyce continues to exert an enormous influence over the writers who have come after him. Generally accepted as the most experimental and daring writer of the twentieth century, Joyce's innovations in the form and content of the novel have not been superseded. If Ulysses is the most influential novel of the twentieth century, Finnegans Wake continues to be the most challenging work in prose fiction in the English language. In James Joyce Revisited, Richard F. Peterson goes back to the classroom in search of those aspects of Joyce's work that make him most accessible and interesting to students."

A critical analysis of Poe's stories, poetry, and criticism, probing the psychological and philosophical aspects of the complex nineteenth-century writer's work.

"Despite the fact that Bernard Malamud (1914-1986) wrote about selflessness and love as they applied to all human beings, he has long been referred to first and foremost as a Jewish-American writer, a term he disliked. Malamud's most significant works, including The Assistant (1957), The Magic Barrel (1958), The Fixer (1966), and The Tenants (1971) dealt with aspects of Jewish experience in both the Old World and the New. He felt, however, that his characters should be understood not for their Jewishness, but rather as symbolic of the human condition, as sufferers."