Understanding Edmund White (Understanding Contemporary American Literature (Hardcover)) - Hardcover

Radel, Nicholas F.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1611171369 ISBN 13: 9781611171365

Publisher: University South Carolina Pr, 2013

Synopsis

Nicholas F. Radel's Understanding Edmund White, the first book-length critical study of White's work, examines America's best-known gay novelist within the changing social contexts of the past half-century, when gay and lesbian people moved from being seen as psychologically deviant to being increasingly accepted as productive members of society. Radel explores the ways White documents this cultural transition, in both his fiction and his nonfiction, and contributes to it by making gay writing a source for new knowledge of sexuality.
Taking into account recent scholarship on White, Radel provides insightful analysis of the author's autobiographical novels and short stories, from A Boy's Own Story through The Married Man and Chaos. Understanding Edmund White makes White's early experimental novels, Forgetting Elena, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, and Caracole, as well as his later historical fiction, Fanny and Hotel de Dream, accessible by showing how their emphasis on sexuality and social change connects them to the autobiographical fictions. Radel also shows how White's most recent novel, Jack Holmes and His Friend, deftly combines historical and autobiographical narratives to become one of the author's most nuanced explorations of American sexuality. Understanding Edmund White additionally contains a new, previously unpublished interview with White that provides revealing information about the impact his work as a biographer has had on his later fiction.
Grounded in ongoing critical debates in social and literary theory central to understanding contemporary gay literature, Radel's introduction to White's complex literary vision portrays the writer's evolving perceptions of the issues confronting his gay characters and narrators, boys and men who struggle in the early autobiographical novels to achieve a sense of self-worth but assume in the later novels and nonfiction confident voices that speak for and about American culture and sexualities of all types.

About this title

About the Author

Nicholas F. Radel is a professor of English at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, USA and coeditor of The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality, and National Identity in American Literature. Radel's articles on Edmund White have appeared in edited collections, literary encyclopaedias, and journals including Modern Fiction Studies. His essays on American film and drama have appeared in Essays in Theatre, Cinema Journal, and elsewhere.

From the Back Cover

A concise analysis of the major works by an accomplished gay novelist, memoirist, and essayist

From the Inside Flap

A concise analysis of the major works by an accomplished gay novelist, memoirist, and essayist

Edition details

• Publisher: University South Carolina Pr
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1611171369
• ISBN 13: 9781611171365
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 160