Essays to help you understand and appreciate the works of Norman Mailer.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [907]-914) and index.

This groundbreaking new source of international scope defines the essay as nonfictional prose texts of between one and 50 pages in length. The more than 500 entries by 275 contributors include entries on nationalities, various categories of essays such as generic (such as sermons, aphorisms), individual major works, notable writers, and periodicals that created a market for essays, and particularly famous or significant essays. The preface details the historical development of the essay, and the alphabetically arranged entries usually include biographical sketch, nationality, era, selected writings list, additional readings, and anthologies

This extensive bibliography and reference guide is an invaluable resource for researchers, practitioners, students, and anyone with an interest in Canadian film and video. With over 24,500 entries, of which 10,500 are annotated, it opens up the literature devoted to Canadian film and video, at last making it readily accessible to scholars and researchers. Drawing on both English and French sources, it identifies books, catalogues, government reports, theses, and periodical and newspaper articles from Canadian and non-Canadian publications from the first decade of the twentieth century to 1989. The work is bilingual; descriptive annotations are presented in the language(s) of the original publication. Canadian Film and Video / Film et vidéo canadiens provides an in-depth guide to the work of over 4000 individuals working in film and video and 5000 films and videos. The entries in Volume I cover topics such as film types, the role of government, laws and legislation, censorship, festivals and awards, production and distribution companies, education, cinema buildings, women and film, and video art. A major section covers filmmakers, video artists, cinematographers, actors, producers, and various other film people. Volume II presents an author index, a film and video title index, and a name and subject index. In the tradition of the highly acclaimed publication Art and Architecture in Canada these volumes fill a long-standing need for a comprehensive reference tool for Canadian film and video. This bibliography guides and supports the work of film historians and practitioners, media librarians and visual curators, students and researchers, and members of the general public with an interest in film and video.

The Dada movement, revered as perhaps the purest form of cultural subversion and provocation in 20th-century Europe, has been a victim of the readiness with which cultural historians have swallowed its own propaganda. Based on extensive close analysis of French-language Dada work in its original form, and offering English translations throughout, this major reappraisal looks at a broad range of media and topics - including poetry, film, philosophy, and quantum physics - in order to get beyond Dada's typecasting as avant-garde anti-hero. Work by women writers and other marginalized figures combines with that of canonical Dadaists to present Dada in a radically new set of guises: poetic and textually subtle; intellectually and philosophically meaningful; peaceable and quasi-Buddhist; and, perhaps most uncomfortably of all, conformist and reactionary.

Emily Dickinson's poem, 'This is my letter to the World/ That never wrote to Me --', opens the Introduction, which focuses on the near-anonymity of nineteenth-century women novelists. Close readings of works by five British novelists Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot offer persuasive accounts of the ways in which women used stealth tactics to outmaneuver their detractors. Chapters examine the 'hidden manifesto' in Austen's works, whose imaginative heroines defend women's writing; the lasting impact of Jane Eyre, with its modest heroine who takes up the pen to tell her own story, even on male writers outside the English tradition; Cathy's testament as the 'ghost-text' of Wuthering Heights; and the shifting gender roles in Daniel Deronda, with its silenced heroine and androgynous hero. Though the focus is on British novelists, the author's discussion of the Anglo-American connections in the factory novels of Elizabeth Gaskell and the slavery writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe has particular relevance for its demonstration of how the move from the private to the public sphere enables and even compels the blurring of national and ethnic boundaries. What emerges is a compelling argument for the relevance of these novelists to the emergence in our own time of hitherto-silenced female voices around the globe.

A genuine literary event—an illuminating collection of correspondence from one of the most acclaimed American writers of all time Over the course of a nearly sixty-year career, Norman Mailer wrote more than 30 novels, essay collections, and nonfiction books. Yet nowhere was he more prolific—or more exposed—than in his letters. All told, Mailer crafted more than 45,000 pieces of correspondence (approximately 20 million words), many of them deeply personal, keeping a copy of almost every one. Now the best of these are published—most for the first time—in one remarkable volume that spans seven decades and, it seems, several lifetimes. Together they form a stunning autobiographical portrait of one of the most original, provocative, and outspoken public intellectuals of the twentieth century. Compiled by Mailer’s authorized biographer, J. Michael Lennon, and organized by decade, Selected Letters of Norman Mailer features the most fascinating of Mailer’s missives from 1940 to 2007—letters to his family and friends, to fans and fellow writers (including Truman Capote, James Baldwin, and Philip Roth), to political figures from Henry Kissinger to Bill and Hillary Clinton, and to such cultural icons as John Lennon, Marlon Brando, and even Monica Lewinsky. Here is Mailer the precocious Harvard undergraduate, writing home to his parents for the first time and worrying that his acceptances by literary magazines were “all happening too easy.” Here, too, is Mailer the soldier, confronting the violence of war in the Pacific, which would become the subject of his masterly debut novel, The Naked and the Dead: “[I’m] amazed how casually it fits into . . . daily life, how very unhorrible it all is.” Mailer the international celebrity pledges to William Styron, “I’m going to write every day, and like Lot’s Wife I’m consigning myself to a pillar of salt if I dare to look back,” while the 1980s Mailer agonizes over the fallout from his ill-fated friendship with Jack Henry Abbott, the murderer who became his literary protégé. (“The continuation of our relationship was depressing for both of us,” he confesses to Joyce Carol Oates.) At last, he finds domestic—and erotic—bliss in the arms of his sixth wife, Norris Church (“We bounce into each other like sunlight”). Whether he is reflecting on the Kennedy assassination, assessing the merits of authors from Fitzgerald to Proust, or threatening to pummel William Styron, the brilliant, pugnacious Norman Mailer comes alive again in these letters. The myriad faces of this artist and activist, lover and fighter, public figure and private man, are laid bare in this collection as never before. Praise for Selected Letters of Norman Mailer “Extraordinary.”—Vanity Fair “As massive as the life they document . . . the autobiography [Mailer] never wrote . . . a kind of map, from the hills and rice paddies of the Philippines through every victory and defeat for the rest of the century and beyond.”—Esquire “The shards and winks at Mailer’s own past that are scattered throughout the letters . . . are so tantalizing. They glitter throughout like unrefined jewels that Mailer took to the grave.”—The New Yorker “Indispensable . . . a subtle document of an unsubtle man’s wit and erudition, even (or especially) when it’s wielded as a weapon.”—New York “Umpteen pleasures to pluck out and roll between your teeth, like seeds from a pomegranate.”—The New York Times

This volume offers new insight into the contextual background and literary-historical impact of Norman Mailer's body of work.

Cultural Writing. THE ENDURING VISION OF NORMAN MAILER is Professor Barry H. Leeds' second book about one of America's most respected, most controversial, and most prolific authors. It looks at Mailer from where Leeds' first volume left off and takes him on through his most recent works. "Leeds' ideas are engaging, his enthusiasm infectious, and his prose mercifully free of critical jargon.Recommended for contemporary literature collections"--William Gargan in Library Journal. This is literary criticism with a heart and soul, and with an appreciation of subject which is so often missed in contemporary analysis.