A Study Guide for Saul Bellow's "Herzog," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

A Study Guide for Saul Bellow's "Leaving the Yellow House," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

A Study Guide for Saul Bellow's "A Silver Dish," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

A Study Guide for Saul Bellow's "Humboldt's Gift," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

A Study Guide for Bernard Malamud's "The Assistant," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

Saul Bellow: "I Was a Jew and an American and a Writer" offers a fresh and original perspective on the life and works of Saul Bellow, the Nobel Prize winner in Literature in 1976. Author Gerald Sorin emphasizes Bellow's Jewish identity as fundamental to his being and the content and meaning of his fiction. Bellow's work from the 1940s to 2000, when he wrote his last novel at the age of 84, centers on the command in Deuteronomy to "Choose life" as distinct from nihilistic withdrawal and the defense of meaninglessness. Although Bellow disdained the label of "American Jewish Writer," Sorin conjectures that he was an outstanding representative of the classification. Bellow and the characters in his fiction not only choose life but also explore what it means to live a good life, however difficult that may be to define, and regardless of how much harder it is to achieve. For Sorin, Bellow realized that at least two obstacles stood in the way: the imperfection of the world and the frailty of the human pursuer. Saul Bellow: "I Was a Jew and an American and a Writer" provides a new and insightful narrative of the life and works of Saul Bellow. By using Bellow's deeply internalized Jewishness and his remarkable imagination and creativity as a lens, Sorin examines how he captured the shifting atmosphere of postwar American culture.

A collection of seven critical essays on the Bellow novel, arranged in chronological order of their original publication.

This book provides insights into the maze of ‘know thyself’ through a carefully detailed, comparative study of the Sartrean no-self and the Deleuzean rhizomic self. It is informative, argumentative and rich in literary context, and mainly focuses on the shift in the notion of self from Sartre’s elegiac, suicidal and nihilistic tone seen pervasively in modernist fiction to the celebratory, Deleuzean self in postmodernist fiction. To trace this shift, the book presents a comparative analysis of selected novels, showing that authors like Bellow and Atwood have adopted a more positive attitude toward the self similar to the Deleuzean rhizomic self, while authors like Hedayat and Beckett have more reductionist, decadent, nihilistic views on the self, like the Sartrean no-self. Moreover, as argued in the cases of the protagonists in the selected novels, this book further asserts that the Deleuzean rhizomic self might be seen as a possible alternative to help one survive in times of crisis, in contrast to the nihilistic Sartrean no-self.

A three-time National Book Award for Fiction winner, Saul Bellow (1915-2005) is one of the most highly regarded American authors to emerge since World War II. His 60-year career produced 14 novels and novellas, two volumes of nonfiction, short story collections, plays and a book of collected letters. His 1953 breakthrough novel The Adventures of Augie March was followed by Seize the Day (1956), Herzog (1964) and Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970). His Humboldt's Gift won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 and contributed to his receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature that year. This literary companion provides more than 200 entries about his works, literary characters, events and persons in his life. Also included are an introduction and overview of Bellow's life, statements made by him during interviews, suggestions for writing and further study and an extensive bibliography.

The overall aim of this book is the application of stylistic theories and frameworks to literary texts for a deeper level of interpretation. For this purpose the author conducted an analysis based upon the concepts of 'polyphony' and 'focalization' of three novels from different literary periods commonly labeled 'Pre-modernism', 'Modernism', and 'Postmodernism', namely, George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-2), Joseph Conrad's Nostromo (1904), and Saul Bellow's Herzog (1964). Inspired by the work of Russian linguist-philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin the author attempts to clarify stylistically how polyphony is textualized in each novel and how each mode of polyphony reflects less parochial literary and cultural trends.