At a time when Richard Ford was considering giving up writing fiction, suddenly he was hailed in Newsweek as "one of the best writers of his generation." Then Ford's The Sportswriter (1986), the story of suburbanite Frank Bascombe's struggle to survive loneliness and great loss, was published to great acclaim. Its sequel, Independence Day (1995), was the first novel to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. With three other novels, a well-received volume of short stories, and a trilogy of novellas to his credit, Ford was firmly established as a major literary figure. The nine essays in this volume demonstrate that Ford, like few other writers of his time, powerfully depicts what it feels like to live in the secular late-twentieth-century world, a dangerous and uncertain place where human relationships are impoverished and human existence is empty and alienated. Perspectives on Richard Ford, the first book-length examination of Richard Ford's fiction, is a reader's essential companion for studying the works of one of America's most outstanding contemporary writers.

Morality, Identity and Narrative in the Fiction of Richard Ford is only the second monograph on the work of Richard Ford and the only one to deal with all three Frank Bascombe novels. The book offers comprehensive readings of the trilogy and the stories of Women with Men and A Multitude of Sins, thus bringing critical work on Ford up to date. It draws on the moral theories of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, and on the work on narrative and identity of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. But it also explores in detail the portrait of contemporary American society and culture offered in the trilogy.

Short stories are usually defined in terms of characteristics of modernism, in which the story begins in the middle, develops according to a truncated plot, and ends with an epiphany. This approach tends to ignore postmodernism, a movement often characterized by a negation of objective reality where plots are seemingly abandoned, surfaces are extraordinary, and symbols turn inward on themselves. This book examines postmodern forms and characteristic themes by analyzing a group of short stories that make use of postmodern narrative strategies, including nonfictional fiction, gender profiling, and death as an image. The volume begins with a discussion of the blurred lines between fiction and nonfiction in the short story and imaginative personal essay. It then looks at the role of women in works by such authors as Sandra Cisneros, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joyce Carol Oates, and Lorrie Moore. This is followed by a section of chapters on postmodern masculinity and short fiction. The next section focuses on death as an image and theme in works by Richard Ford, Richard Brautigan, and James Joyce. The final set of chapters considers postmodern short fiction from South Africa and Canada.

Richard Ford and the Fiction of Masculinities demonstrates how contemporary U.S. novelist Richard Ford, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for literature, rewrites gender, and in particular masculinity, from highly subversive and innovative perspectives. Josep M. Armengol analyzes the construction, as well as the de-construction, of masculinity in all of Ford's major fictional texts to date, ranging from A Piece of My Heart to The Sportswriter to The Lay of the Land. Given its simultaneous critique of traditional masculinity and its depiction of alternative models of being a man, Ford's fiction is shown to be particularly interesting from a men's studies perspective, which aims not only to undermine patriarchal masculinity but also to look for new, non-hierarchical, and more egalitarian models of being a man in contemporary U.S. culture and literature. By framing Ford's contemporary representations of masculinity within a more general context of American literature, this book reveals how his texts continue along a trajectory of earlier American fiction while they also re-examine masculinity in new, more complex ways. Richard Ford and the Fiction of Masculinities contributes to the much-needed revision of men and masculinities in U. S. literature, and especially Richard Ford's fiction, where constructions of gender and masculinity remain, paradoxically enough, largely unexplored.

Pocos novelistas contemporáneos han analizado la cultura americana con el detalle con el que lo ha hecho Richard Ford en su trilogía sobre Frank Bascombe: 'The Sportswriter', 'Independence Day' y 'The Lay of the Land'. Un tríptico sobre la idiosincrasia de la sociedad norteamericana expuesto por uno de los narradores más meticulosos de la nación. Este libro se aventura en un territorio sin explorar, revelando cómo el singular sabor americano de las novelas de Frank Bascombe también surge de escenarios peculiares y de los personajes marginales, que proponen modelos de identidad alternativos. Esta obra redescubre la esencia del principal proyecto novelístico de Ford, desvelándolo como una fuente infinita de percepciones para cualquier lector interesado en la gente, los mitos y las narrativas que construyen el ser americano.

Praise for the previous edition:Booklist/RBB "Twenty Best Bets for Student Researchers"RUSA/ALA "Outstanding Reference Source"" ... useful ... Recommended for public libraries and undergraduates."

"An original exploration of the work of writer Richard Ford in the context of its place within contemporary debates about the possible role, meaning of, and value of literary realism in a postmodern age"--

"Drawing on a body of literature published between 1945 and 2016, Contested Terrain proposes a more expansive treatment of suburban fiction as a discourse that operates within national and transnational geographies. Wilhite argues that the suburbs and suburban narratives reflect the latest, perhaps final outpost in the tradition of U.S. regionalism. Although he may be accused of simply substituting one outmoded methodology for another, such a critique depends on misreading regionalism as either a sub-literary genre or, as Roberto Dainotto suggests, a pernicious political ideology that opposes modernity and suppresses difference in the naive pursuit of "grounded, rooted, natural, authentic values shared by a true community." In opposition to such withering appraisals, Contested Terrain demonstrates that, as both a literary discourse and a mode of geopolitical analysis, regionalism clarifies the fraught relationship between isolationism and imperialism that has shaped U.S. residential geography and, in turn, helps us rethink the role literary texts play in the postwar project of suburban nation building"--

A unique and original reading of the American imaginary

Interviews with the Pulitzer Prize--winning author of The Sportswriter and Independence Day