Although readers will encounter many usually canonized suspects, Buell’s scope is wide enough to encompass the varieties of...
A history and investigation of a literary concept that has “refused to die.”
The idea of the Great American Novel (nicknamed GAN by Henry James) as a writer’s golden quest seemed to Buell (American Literature/Harvard Univ.; The Future of Environmental Criticism, 2005, etc.) to have devolved from its 19th-century origins to become a media cliché not worth more consideration than “a brisk, short narrative.” However, the author became intrigued as he looked at some of the works proposed for the honorific. Could any novel, as novelist John W. De Forest asked in 1868, capture “the American soul”? That question reflected anxieties about “national cultural legitimacy” when expansionism and post–Civil War reunification raised nettling concerns about the nation’s identity. These questions, Buell contends, are still worth asking, even though the country’s “fractious heterogeneity” has led to the idea of plural GANs. What, he asks, can thinking about GANs reveal “about how the novels in question work, about national culture generally, about novels as carriers or definers of cultural nationality, and about what value to set on all that—whether it’s cultural asset or cultural baggage”? He responds by proposing that a GAN needs to meet one of four criteria: to be reimagined by later authors (e.g., The Scarlet Letter); to trace the life of a typically American type (e.g., The Great Gatsby); to consider the impact of social, ethnic or racial divisions (e.g., Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Beloved); or to reflect on the complications of democracy and “the imperiled social collective” (e.g, Dos Passos’ U.S.A.). Buell, whose major scholarship has focused on transcendentalism and, more recently, environmentalism, takes a conversational and sometimes-humorous tone as he offers perceptive analyses of novels and their receptions, especially by those who championed their choices as GANs.
Although readers will encounter many usually canonized suspects, Buell’s scope is wide enough to encompass the varieties of novelists’ imaginations and to consider the implications of multiculturalism and globalism in redefining the future of American fiction.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-674-05115-7
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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