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Theodore Dreiser is indisputably one of America's most important twentieth-century novelists. "An American Tragedy," "Sister Carrie," and "Jenny Gerhardt" have all made an indelible mark on the American literary landscape. And yet remarkably few critical books and no recent collections of critical essays have been published that attempt to answer current theoretical questions about Dreiser's entire canon.

What were Dreiser's relationships with women and how did they inform his characters? What can we learn from his work about the lives and struggles of working women in turn-of-the-century America? Why did Dreiser appropriate the romance form to comment about life in the 1890's? This collection, which presents new essays that raise contemporary theoretical questions about his work as a whole, is the first to appear in twenty-four years. The ten contributing essayists offer original interpretations of Dreiser's works from such disparate points of view as new historicism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism, film studies, and canon formation.

A vital reassessment, "Theodore Dreiser: Beyond Naturalism" brings this influential modern writer into the 1990s by viewing him through the lens of the latest literary theory and cultural criticism. ... Read more

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A brief survey of Dreiser's career up to the writing of "The Color of a Great City" in 1924.

THIS TITLE IS CITED AND RECOMMENDED BY:Catalogue of the Lamont Library, Harvard College. ... Read more

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Reading the Symptom is concerned with naturalism; it is also necessarily concerned with capitalism as the complex-structuring whole within which naturalism operates and from which it cannot be disengaged. Tightly connected with this polemic assertion is a methodological proposition: naturalism-and by extension capitalism-is characterized not only by its logic, but also by its asymmetrical dynamism. Focusing on Frank Norris's McTeague (and its companion piece Vandover and the Brute) and Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, this study argues that naturalism puts into question the very system it exemplifies. Naturalism has a transgressive element at its core, the appreciation of which calls for a special attention to the role and consequence of the emergent, the aleatory, and the stochastic. To explore the interplay between the systematic and the asystematic is not only to come to the conclusion that naturalism is an open, creative system, but also to realize that uneven development is the basic law of social formations. ... Read more

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THIS 88 PAGE ARTICLE WAS EXTRACTED FROM THE BOOK: A Book of Prefaces, by H. L. Mencken. To purchase the entire book, please order ISBN 1417906812. ... Read more

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Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

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Hardly shy about himself or his work, Theodore Dreiser knew the value of publicity. Over four decades he often consented to interviews, answering questions about his fiction, his politics, and even previous interviews. Throughout his life Dreiser raised a storm of protest with his realistic novels, blistered public figures and other authors with un-tempered criticism, scorned pieties masking brutality in law and economics, and expressed a few contradictions of his own. This volume collects for the first time more than seventy interviews. As a group, they show Dreiser dealing with an array of literary and social issues, as well as his lifelong incapacity to mince words. Dreiser is revealed in these interviews as a public figure of epic proportions. ... Read more

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In this volume of reminiscences and correspondence, Theodore Dreiser's literary secretary and lover, the late Marguerite Tjader, re-created her professional and personal experiences with the novelist and many of his noted contemporaries. Along the narrative way, she also speaks about her editorship of the important left-wing magazine Direction during the late thirties and early forties. Her memoir is edited, prefaced, and endnoted by Dreiser scholar Lawrence E. Hussman (Dreiser and His Fiction: A Twentieth-Century Quest). Also included are Dreiser's and Tjader's contributions to Direction. This book should establish once and for all that Dreiser was not the womanizer of myth but a thoughtful and sensitive lover, as well as one of the United States' greatest writers. ... Read more