A collection of critical essays on McCullers' fictional work, The ballad of the sad cafe.

A Southern woman is undone by love and gossip in the classic novella, one of seven stories in this “brilliant . . . panorama of remarkable talent” (The New York Times). One of the most celebrated and enduringly popular works in Southern literature, this collection assembles Carson McCullers’s best stories, including her beloved novella “The Ballad of the Sad Café.” A haunting tale of love and violence in a small Southern town, the novella introduces readers to Miss Amelia, a formidable woman whose home serves as the town’s gathering place. Among other fine works, the collection also includes McCullers’s first published story, “Wunderkind,” about a musical prodigy who suddenly realizes she will not go on to become a great pianist. First published in 1951, The Ballad of the Sad Café was adapted for the stage by the Edward Albee and later made into a film starring Vanessa Redgrave and Keith Carradine. “McCullers's finest stories.” —The New York Times

Carson McCullers was deemed the "find of the decade" when she appeared on the literary scene at the age of twenty-three and is best remembered for her celebrated novels "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" and "The Member of the Wedding." This book provides a balanced introductory study of her major fiction and shows her as more than a lesbian novelist.

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1.0, Dresden Technical University (Institut f r Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: Images of the American South, 22 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: This paper is going to examine how the southern-born writer Carson McCullers creates the lonely picture of an individual living in hopeless spiritual isolation in a southern town. The South used to be a rural area with its own distinctive culture and a "strong folk tradition, preserved mainly through music and language" (Forkner 91). It will be discussed how this image had to give way to the new reality of the South by the time of the 1940s. It had turned into an interchangeable urbanized society which excluded the individual which did not correspond to southern norms. Furthermore, by analyzing the main characters of The Ballad of the Sad Caf , the paper points out the unique dreariness of McCullers' visions, looking for reasons in her childhood as well as in her adult life. Focusing on her work The Ballad of the Sad Caf , the paper underlines that McCullers was always questioning the national identity of 20th century America in general, and the transforming southern society in particular. Further on, it discusses the crucial difference between Carson McCullers' and William Faulkner, who is known as the most recognized writer of her time. By interpreting the novelette The Ballad of the Sad Caf , the paper is going to highlight the topic McCullers was most concerned about: The spiritual isolation of the individual. An isolation which is deeply rooted within a person who does not fit into the narrow-minded and prefabricated picture of the stereotypical southern society. Finally, my paper emphasizes Carson McCullers' concern with gender and behavioral concepts in the early 20th century, which she turned upside down in order to uncover the artificiality of the southern myth and its rigid moral conceptions.

Presents a collection of critical essays on the works of Carson McCullers.

Presents an alphabetical reference guide detailing the lives and works of authors associated with Gothic literature.

A landmark gathering of McCullers’ shorter works, including all her published stories, plays, essays, poems, and an unfinished autobiography Celebrated worldwide for her masterly novels, Carson McCullers was equally accomplished, and equally moving, when writing in shorter forms. This Library of America volume brings together for the first time her twenty extraordinary stories, along with plays, essays, memoirs, and poems. Here are the indelible tales “Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland” and “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.” as well as her previously uncollected story about the civil rights movement, “The March”; her award- winning Broadway play The Member of the Wedding and the unpublished teleplay The Sojourner; twenty-two essays; and the revealing unfinished memoir Illumination and Night Glare. This wide-ranging gathering of shorter works reveals new depths and dimensions of the writer whom V. S. Pritchett praised for her “courageous imagination—one that is bold enough to consider the terrible in human nature without loss of nerve, calm, dignity, or love.” LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

This volume presents a compelling mélange of chapters focusing on the myriad ways in which performance and gender are inextricably bound to identity. It shows how gender, performance and identity play themselves out in various ways, contexts and genres, in order to illumine the very instability and fluidity of identity as a static category. As such, it is a must-read for anyone interested in gender studies, identity politics and literature in general.

What do narratives by British suffragettes of being forcibly fed have in common with the representation of indigenous women in Canadian police archives? How are literary representations of domestic violence related to the use of silence as a strategy of resistance in African American women's writing? How are modernist fictions of gay male desire connected with ambiguous sexual performances in rock music or with images of Vietnam veterans in American horror movies? What does a narrative of women's participation in Bengali national resistance movements share with an ethnographic study of prostitution in Papua New Guinea? These are the some of the specific questions raised by the essays in this volume, which examines a wide variety of historical and cultural locations where differently sexed, gendered, and racialized bodies have been constructed. More generally, this volume addresses theoretical debates over whether embodiment is best understood through representations or performances. Are bodies written or enacted? The different answers to these questions have important consequences for how we understand the inscription of bodies with systems of power and the possibilities that exist for resisting those systems. [ go to the Genders website ]