Britisk - amerikansk litteratur

After it was originally published in Norwegian in Minneapolis in 1887, A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter receded into oblivion to reside there for more than a century. In 2002 it was translated by Gerhard Thorson and made available to an English-reading audience, extensively edited and introduced by Professor Orm Øverland. The essays collected in this critical companion approach Drude Krog Janson’s novel from a range of various perspectives pertaining to social, cultural and gender history, aesthetic, generic and narrative fields of inquiry. At some level they all engage, however, the activity of the self’s struggle to demarcate its distinguished and distinguishable space. This is the "activity" of the protagonist of A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter, of the novel’s reception, and on one level it is also the activity of American literature and its history.

The purpose of this book is twofold. First, it is intended as a further exploration of Emily Dickinson’s poetic language. It shares certain aims and methods with the works of my predecessors in the study of the poet’s verbal artistry. Only two previous works are concerned exclusively with her art: Charles R. Anderson^ Emily Dickinson^s Poetry: Stairway of Surprise, which contains brilliant dose readings of some of Dickinson^s finest poems; and the more recent study by David T. Porter, The Art of Emily Dickinson^s Early Poetry. Charles Anderson is here preeminently the literary critic who sees it as his duty to establish the excellence of the poet’s achievement; this attitude is the admirable limitation of his book. David Porter does not shy away from even inferior poems; the restriction he has set himself?to study only the early poetry?inevitably forces him to consider many mediocre verses. His thorough investigation of the poet’s technique takes him up to the moment when she commits herself in earnest to the career of a poet by her appeal to an established literary authority for advice about her work. It has seemed to me important to explore all the poetry; to try to distinguish the good from the poor; to observe how and why the poet fails or succeeds. In this procedure of distillation I wish to make the reader a participant or witness. By using the entire canon as material, it may be possible to suggest, if not a line of development, at least relatively distinct preferences during different periods of the poet’s career.My method differs from those of Anderson and Porter. It is uniike the former in that it studies a definite set of stylistic elements at several levels of the poet^s language; it is somewhat different from the method of the latter scholar in using as its unifying principle features of language, not theme (as Porter’s theme of aspiration) or mental or psychological attitudes. My method also involves a greater reliance on linguistic facts than does Portens.

Novus Studies in Literature 7.

Studies in the Fiction of Thomas PynchonThomas Pynchon (born 1937) is considered one of the greatest Anglo-American novelists of our time and arguably the most important since James Joyce. His amazingly rich, multifarious and original works of literature have been a major interest for especially American scholars for decades, and his novels have also attained cult status in a wider cultural context. Pynchon?s oeuvre consists of a collection of short stories, Slow Learner (1984), and five novels. His debut novel, V. (1963) is said to be one of the most masterful first novels in the history of literature; the second novel, The Crying of Lot 49, was published in 1967; Gravity?s Rainbow (1973) ranks among the most complex and challenging literary novels ever written; by comparison, Vineland (1991) is an easy read. With his last novel, Mason & Dixon (1997), Pynchon has once again provided readers with puzzles and intellectual challenges for years to come. Blissful Bewilderment: Studies in the Fiction of Thomas Pynchon is the first book-length study on Pynchon to be published outside of the UK and the US since 1993. The essays in the collection cover all of Pynchon?s works, representing a wide variety of perspectives and approaches. Thus, the book will be of interest for academic readers, as well as for those not yet acquainted with Thomas Pynchon?s strange universe.Anne Mangen is a Research Fellow at the Department of Media Studies, Volda University College, Norway. Rolf Gaasland is Professor at the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Tromsoe, Norway.

Novus Studies in Literature 4.

The first part of Faulkner and Other Southern Writers includes ten articles on various aspects of William Faulkner’s writing. Here are discussions of the early as well as of the late career, a study of metafictional elements in Faulkner’s fiction as well as of the existential experience that can be found in many of his short stories. Even Faulkner’s humor is considered, and in an attempt to compare two great contemporary writers in different languages, the modernisms of Faulkner and the great Norwegian novelist Olav Duun are investigated. The second part of the book consists of articles on Southern writers Mary Boykin Chesnut, Shelby Foote, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty and Cormack McCarthy. They are all approached in different ways, but with the exception of one of the two articles on Shelby Foote, all the essays basically deal with one single work of fiction - from Foote’s monumental The Civil War: A Narrative to the terrifying beauty of McCarthy’s last "Southern book," Suttree. Hans H. Skei is professor of comparative literature at the University of Oslo. His most recent book is Reading Faulkner’s Best Short Stories (University of South Carolina Press, 1999), and together with Per Winther and Jakob Lothe he has edited and contributed to The Art of Brevity. Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis, published by the same press in 2004.

Novus Studies in Literature 8.