Some of the most noteworthy graphic novels and comic books of recent years have been entirely autobiographical. In Graphic Subjects, Michael A. Chaney brings together a lively mix of scholars to examine the use of autobiography within graphic novels, including such critically acclaimed examples as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, David Beauchard’s Epileptic, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Alan Moore’s Watchmen, and Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese.
One of the foremost Russian writers of the Soviet period, Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) has attracted much critical attention. But Edythe Haber is the first to explore in depth his formative years, to probe the roots of his artistic vision. Her study yields a new picture of the novelist and playwright working in tumultuous times, and a fresh understanding of his ultimate masterpiece, The Master and Margarita.
Bulgakov as writer was born out of the chaos of the Russian revolution and civil war. Haber shows how he mines his civil war experience for literary purposes, and how he molds and remolds his protagonist, transforming the tormented intellectual of the earliest fiction into a complex solitary hero. In achieving in his fiction a version of the creative self, an autobiographical hero, Bulgakov redefines such traditional moral categories as courage and honor. Blending biography and literary analysis of motifs, story, and characterization, Haber tracks one writer's answer to the dislocations of revolution, civil war, and early Bolshevism. And from her examination of Bulgakov's satirical writings a vivid panorama emerges of the burgeoning Soviet society. These comic sketches and novellas, blending the fantastic and quotidian, evoke an intellectual's struggle with a hostile new world. In Haber's trenchant and broadly informed analysis we can see how the themes and characters of the early works receive their final permutation--and transcendence--in The Master and Margarita, surely the finest novel produced in Russia since the Revolution.
Considering novels along with journalism, theatrical performances, correspondences, and face-to-face encounters, Lucey focuses on the interlocking social and formal dimensions of using the first person. He argues for understanding the first person not just as a grammatical category but also as a collectively produced social artifact, demonstrating that Proust’s, Gide’s, and Colette’s use of the first person involved a social process of assuming the authority to speak about certain issues, or on behalf of certain people. Lucey reveals these three writers as both practitioners and theorists of the first person; he traces how, when they figured themselves or other first persons in certain statements regarding same-sex identity, they self-consciously called attention to the creative effort involved in doing so.
One Kind of Everything elucidates the uses of autobiography and constructions of personhood in American poetry since World War II, with helpful reference to American literature in general since Emerson. Taking on one of the most crucial issues in American poetry of the last fifty years, celebrated poet Dan Chiasson explores what is lost or gained when real-life experiences are made part of the subject matter and source material for poetry. In five extended, scholarly essays—on Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank Bidart, Frank O’Hara, and Louise Glück—Chiasson looks specifically to bridge the chasm between formal and experimental poetry in the United States. Regardless of form, Chiasson argues that recent American poetry is most thoughtful when it engages most forcefully with autobiographical material, either in an effort to embrace it or denounce it.
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