“This is one of those special novels—a piece of working magic, warm, funny, and sane.”—Thomas Pynchon The whooping crane rustlers are girls. Young girls. Cowgirls, as a matter of fact, all “bursting with dimples and hormones”—and the FBI has never seen anything quite like them. Yet their rebellion at the Rubber Rose Ranch is almost overshadowed by the arrival of the legendary Sissy Hankshaw, a white-trash goddess literally born to hitchhike, and the freest female of them all. Freedom, its prizes and its prices, is a major theme of Tom Robbins’s classic tale of eccentric adventure. As his robust characters attempt to turn the tables on fate, the reader is drawn along on a tragicomic joyride across the badlands of sexuality, wild rivers of language, and the frontiers of the mind.

This is the first book-length study of the popular novelist Tom Robbins. Whimsy and humor characterize Robbins' work, but style and language are the keystones. Hoyser and Stookey show how Robbins deftly uses style and humor to depict the absurdities and injustices of our world. His novels constantly challenge perceptions of the world that people automatically label as normal. His fiction criticizes the complacency of humans in a world becoming increasingly alienated from nature and the joy of life. In addition to a critical analysis of each of his novels, the study contains biographical material never before published and the first full-length bibliography on Robbins, including a bibliography of reviews of his fiction. This is the first book-length study of the popular novelist Tom Robbins. Whimsy and humor characterize Robbins' work, but style and language are the keystones. Hoyser and Stookey show how Robbins deftly uses style and humor to depict the absurdities and injustices of our world. His novels constantly challenge perceptions of the world that people automatically label as normal. His fiction criticizes the complacency of humans in a world becoming increasingly alienated from nature and the joy of life. In addition to a critical analysis of each of his novels, the study contains biographical material never before published and the first full-length bibliography on Robbins, including a bibliography of reviews of his fiction. The study features a biographical chapter, a chapter on context and style, and individual chapters on each of his novels, ^IAnother Roadside Attraction^R, ^IEven Cowgirls Get the Blues, Still Life with Woodpecker, Jitterbug Perfume, skinny legs and all^R, and ^IHalf Asleep in Frog Pajamas^R. Each novel is analyzed for plot structure, characterization, and thematic elements. In addition, Hoyser and Stookey define and apply an alternative critical perspective from which to read each novel. The reading of each of Robbins' novels will be enriched by this perceptive study.

The Hippie movement of the 1960s helped change modern societal attitudes toward ethnic and cultural diversity, environmental accountability, spiritual expressiveness, and the justification of war. With roots in the Beat literary movement of the late 1950s, the hippie perspective also advocated a bohemian lifestyle which expressed distaste for hypocrisy and materialism yet did so without the dark, somewhat forced undertones of their predecessors. This cultural revaluation which developed as a direct response to the dark days of World War II created a counterculture which came to be at the epicenter of an American societal debate and, ultimately, saw the beginnings of postmodernism. Focusing on 1962 through 1976, this book takes a constructivist look at the hippie era's key works of prose, which in turn may be viewed as the literary canon of the counterculture. It examines the ways in which these works, with their tendency toward whimsy and spontaneity, are genuinely reflective of the period. Arranged chronologically, the discussed works function as a lens for viewing the period as a whole, providing a more rounded sense of the hippie Zeitgeist that shaped and inspired the period. Among the 15 works represented are One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Crying of Lot 49, Trout Fishing in America, Siddhartha, Stranger in a Strange Land, Slaughterhouse Five and The Fan Man.

Ecofeminist Literary Criticism is the first collection of its kind: a diverse anthology that explores both how ecofeminism can enrich literary criticism and how literary criticism can contribute to ecofeminist theory and activism. Ecofeminism is a practical movement for social change that discerns interconnections among all forms of oppression: the exploitation of nature, the oppression of women, class exploitation, racism, colonialism. Against binary divisions such as self/other, culture/nature, man/woman, humans/animals, and white/non-white, ecofeminist theory asserts that human identity is shaped by more fluid relationships and by an acknowledgment of both connection and difference. Once considered the province of philosophy and women's studies, ecofeminism in recent years has been incorporated into a broader spectrum of academic discourse. Ecofeminist Literary Criticism assembles some of the most insightful advocates of this perspective to illuminate ecofeminism as a valuable component of literary criticism.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1996

This incisive book provides an in-depth critical and biographical study of the artistic range of film director Gus Van Sant. Arranged chronologically, Gus Van Sant: His Own Private Cinema provides a comprehensive overview of the life and art of this talented director, covering his mainstream, commercial, and avant-garde projects. More than a biography, the book examines Van Sant's incredibly diverse body of work, exploring the influence of his open homosexuality; of fine art, literature, and music; and of the range of cinema styles to which he has been exposed. Stressing Van Sant's wide-ranging content, genre, style, and cinematic presentation, author Vincent LoBrutto details the filmmaker's autobiographical tendencies and how he uses the film craft, literature, popular music, and fine arts to create his movies. The book dissects ways in which each of his films reflects Van Sant's sexual orientation, whether the individual film has a gay theme or not. Because of its importance to Van Sant's films, the book also offers a history of gay culture, past and present, covering its influence on art, music, theater, and dance, as well as community, activism, and prejudice.

Throughout his works, Thomas Pynchon uses various animal characters to narrate fables that are vital to postmodernism and ecocriticism. Thomas Pynchon’s Animal Tales: Fables for Ecocriticism examines case studies of animal representation in Pynchon’s texts, such as alligators in the sewer in V.; the alligator purse in Bleeding Edge; dolphins in the Miami Seaquarium in The Crying of Lot 49; dodoes, pigs, and octopuses in Gravity’s Rainbow; Bigfoot and Godzilla in Vineland and Inherent Vice; and preternatural dogs and mythical worms in Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. Through this exploration, Keita Hatooka illuminates how radically and imaginatively the legendary novelist depicts his empathy for nonhuman beings. Furthermore, by conducting a comparative study of Pynchon’s narratives and his contemporary documentarians and thinkers, Thomas Pynchon’s Animal Tales leads readers to draw great lessons from the fables, which stimulate our ecocritical thought for tomorrow.

Beloved, controversial, influential, the creator of such fascinating and award-winning films as My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, Elephant, and Milk, Gus Van Sant stands among the great international directors, equally at home in Hollywood and the avant-garde. Examining his films thematically, this book finds consistency of vision in Van Sant's unique approach to cinema, which deploys postmodernist techniques such as appropriation, nonlinear narrative, and queering--not in the service of the chic but to apply an all-inclusive viewpoint to ageless tales of life, love and death. Van Sant's films are viewed through a multi-genre prism, including the work of Bruce Weber and Derek Jarman, the westerns of Sam Peckinpah, the music of the Velvet Underground and Nirvana, the fiction of Sam D'Allesandro, and especially the "cut-up"/collage practice of intertextual authorship pioneered by William Burroughs.

The Fantastic Other is a carefully assembled collection of essays on the increasingly significant question of alterity in modern fantasy, the ways in which the understanding and construction of the Other shapes both our art and our imagination. The collection takes a unique perspective, seeing alterity not merely as a social issue but as a biological one. Our fifteen essays cover the problems posed by the Other, which, after all, go well beyond the bounds of any single critical perspective. With this in mind, we have selected studies to show how insights from deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, and Freudian, Jungian and evolutionary psychology help us understand an issue so central to the act of reading.