Stephen Fender

This short study guide tells you all you need to know about John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. Connell Guides are advanced guide books that offer sophisticated analysis and broad critical perspectives for higher-level GCSE and A Level English Literature students.

This acclaimed landmark work - in this substantially revised second edition - is a key study of the American cultural experience. It examines the formation of an American personal and national identity through the experience of emigration. It asks what was the 'American difference', and what constitutes the American character. It explores in detail the crucial influence of emigration from Europe. It explores American readiness to change, to break with the past, and its faith in future possibilities. Every one of these supposed qualities is traced by Professor Fender to the psychology of emigration. As a new nation, America had to create and define itself. As the rebellious child of a distant but powerful parent America had to struggle against a metropolitan center with which it shared a language and a legal system, but it strenuously defined itself differently. This work is about the power of American ideology and how it unlocked the creative potential in the lives and writings for 'ordinary' people. It is a work like no other. It says much that is original on writers such as Cooper, Jefferson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Dreiser and Will Cather, among others. Professor Fender has also examined many accounts of ordinary people through diaries, letters and contemporary documents. The book examines how innovations in structures of life, government and writing entailed key cultural themes. It argues that the rhetoric in which emigration was promoted, defended and attacked became the exhilarations and the anxieties of the American difference. American literature thus returns repeatedly to narratives of captivity, adolescence and initiation as shown in its distinctive literary forms.

This acclaimed landmark work - in this substantially revised second edition - is a key study of the American cultural experience. It examines the formation of an American personal and national identity through the experience of emigration. It asks what was the 'American difference', and what constitutes the American character. It explores in detail the crucial influence of emigration from Europe. It explores American readiness to change, to break with the past, and its faith in future possibilities. Every one of these supposed qualities is traced by Professor Fender to the psychology of emigration. As a new nation, America had to create and define itself. As the rebellious child of a distant but powerful parent America had to struggle against a metropolitan center with which it shared a language and a legal system, but it strenuously defined itself differently. This work is about the power of American ideology and how it unlocked the creative potential in the lives and writings for 'ordinary' people. It is a work like no other. It says much that is original on writers such as Cooper, Jefferson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Dreiser and Will Cather, among others. Professor Fender has also examined many accounts of ordinary people through diaries, letters and contemporary documents. The book examines how innovations in structures of life, government and writing entailed key cultural themes. It argues that the rhetoric in which emigration was promoted, defended and attacked became the exhilarations and the anxieties of the American difference. American literature thus returns repeatedly to narratives of captivity, adolescence and initiation as shown in its distinctive literary forms.

Working through close rhetorical analysis of everything from fiction and journalism to documents and documentaries, this book looks at how popular memory favors the country Depression over the economic crisis in the nation’s cities and factories. Over eighty years after it happened, the Depression still lives on in iconic images of country poor whites – in the novels of John Steinbeck, the photographs of Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein, the documentary films of Pare Lorenz and the thousands of share-croppers’ life histories as taken down by the workers of the Federal Writers’ Project. Like the politicians and bureaucrats who accomplished the New Deal’s radical reforms in banking, social security and labor union law, the artists, novelists and other writers who supported or even worked for the New Deal were idealists, well to the left of center in their politics. Yet when it came to hard times on the American farm, something turned them into unwitting reactionaries. Though they brought these broken lives of the country poor to the notice and sympathy of the public, they also worked unconsciously to undermine their condition. How and why? Fender shows how the answer lies in clues overlooked until now, hidden in their writing -- their journalism and novels, the "life histories" they ghost wrote for their poor white clients, the bureaucratic communications through which they administered these cultural programs, even in the documentary photographs and movies, with their insistent captions and voice-overs. This book is a study of literary examples from in and around the country Depression, and the myths on which they drew.

First published between 1982 and 1983, this series examines the peculiarly American cultural context out of which the nation’s literature has developed. Covering the years from 1620 to 1830, this first volume of American Literature in Context examines a range of texts from the writings of the Puritan settlers through the declaration of Independence to the novels of Fenimore Cooper. In doing so, it shows how early Americans thought about their growing nation, their arguments for immigration, for political and cultural independence, and the doubts they experienced in this ambitious project. This book will be of interest to those studying American literature and American studies.

First published between 1982 and 1983, this series examines the peculiarly American cultural context out of which the nation’s literature has developed. Covering the years from 1620 to 1830, this first volume of American Literature in Context examines a range of texts from the writings of the Puritan settlers through the declaration of Independence to the novels of Fenimore Cooper. In doing so, it shows how early Americans thought about their growing nation, their arguments for immigration, for political and cultural independence, and the doubts they experienced in this ambitious project. This book will be of interest to those studying American literature and American studies.

English writers have a way of invoking paternal imagery when thinking of Chaucer. "The Medieval word for a Poet, was a Maker," said G. K Chesterton, and "there was never a man who was more of a maker than Chaucer. He made a national language; he came very near to making a nation. At least without him it would probably have been neither so fine a language or so great a nation. Shakespeare and Milton were the greatest sons of their country; but Chaucer was the father of his country, rather in the manner of George Washington." A sweeping claim, maybe, but with a nucleus of truth. Chaucer really was a kind of English founding father. He didn't invent the language for literature but he chose it - and put his energy into exploiting and developing it. And The Canterbury Tales is where it happened. The Canterbury Tales was truly original. Chaucer's narrators, pilgrims on the road to Canterbury, range from a knight to a wealthy landowner, a merchant, a miller and minor church officials. They are brought to life by vivid descriptions of their clothing, bodily appearance and behaviour - and through the wide variety of English vernacular they voice. These are the raw materials out of which Chaucer not only produces comedy but develops themes like the condition of the church, the conflict between fate and free will, and what it is that constitutes authority, whether in the Bible or the conventions of courtly-love romance. In 1478, the printer William Caxton thought it to be such an English monument that he invested a fortune in time and money to publish The Canterbury Tales as the first ever book in English to be printed in England. It has never been out of print since.

Within two years of coming out in 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird had been translated into ten languages, won the Pulitzer Prize, and been made into an Oscar-winning film. It spent an astonishing 88 weeks on the American bestseller lists. But while acclaimed by critics it also attracted attention of a different kind. Like The Catcher in the Rye (1951), that other bestseller about childhood, Mockingbird was widely banned from local libraries and school curricula from the 1960s through to the 1980s. One early reviewer called To Kill a Mockingbird "a wholesome book on an unwholesome theme". Those charged with the care of the youth were hypersensitive about what the fictional young should be made to see and hear in novels: words like "damn", "piss", "whore lady" - and (as with Huckleberry Finn) "nigger" - even though in the context of a critique of racial prejudice. But the objections went beyond words alone. The story of children being confronted by a rape case seemed inappropriate in a book to be read by real-life children. So did the book's portrayal of "institutionalized racism", as one group of protestors in Indiana put it, "under the guise of 'good literature'". In this compelling guide, Stephen Fender looks at why a novel which has been called a "period piece" remains so popular - and examines what it tells us about racism and indeed about the nature of humanity.

Working through close rhetorical analysis of everything from fiction and journalism to documents and documentaries, this book looks at how popular memory favors the country Depression over the economic crisis in the nation’s cities and factories. Over eighty years after it happened, the Depression still lives on in iconic images of country poor whites – in the novels of John Steinbeck, the photographs of Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein, the documentary films of Pare Lorenz and the thousands of share-croppers’ life histories as taken down by the workers of the Federal Writers’ Project. Like the politicians and bureaucrats who accomplished the New Deal’s radical reforms in banking, social security and labor union law, the artists, novelists and other writers who supported or even worked for the New Deal were idealists, well to the left of center in their politics. Yet when it came to hard times on the American farm, something turned them into unwitting reactionaries. Though they brought these broken lives of the country poor to the notice and sympathy of the public, they also worked unconsciously to undermine their condition. How and why? Fender shows how the answer lies in clues overlooked until now, hidden in their writing -- their journalism and novels, the "life histories" they ghost wrote for their poor white clients, the bureaucratic communications through which they administered these cultural programs, even in the documentary photographs and movies, with their insistent captions and voice-overs. This book is a study of literary examples from in and around the country Depression, and the myths on which they drew.

Love, sex, death, boredom, ecstasy, existential angst, political upheaval - the history of literature offers a rich and varied exploration of the human condition across the centuries. In this absorbing companion to literature's rich past, arranged by days of the year, acclaimed critics and friends Stephen Fender and John Sutherland turn up the most inspiring, enlightening, surprising or curious artefacts that literature has to offer. Find out why 16 June 1904 mattered so much to Joyce, which great literary love affair was brought to a tragic end on 11 February 1963 and why Roy Campbell punched Stephen Spender on the nose on 14 April 1949 in this sumptuous voyage through the highs and lows of literature's bejewelled past.

This book focuses on the experience of the Californian Gold Rush of 1849–1850, not in terms of what happened (a subject much covered by historians) but in terms of how people of various levels of sophistication wrote about it. Drawing on a variety of sources - diaries, journals, letters, and contemporary journalism - Dr Fender explores how both amateur and professional writers attempted to come to terms with the physical wilderness of the transcontinental landscape and the social wilderness of early California. Dr Fender has produced an intriguing and highly readable book, which should prove fascinating not only to a wide range of students in the field of American studies but also to non-specialists who are interested in nineteenth-century American literary and cultural history.