University Of South Carolina Press: 384 books

Before the full and honest tale of humanity can be told, it will be necessary to uncover the hidden roles of women in it and recover their voices from the forces that have diminished their contributions or even at times deliberately eclipsed them. The past half-century has seen women rise to claim...

Bathsheba is a mysterious and enigmatic figure who appears in only seventy-six verses of the Bible and whose story is riddled with gaps. But this seemingly minor female character, who plays a critical role in King David’s story, has survived through the ages, and her “afterlife” in the history...

Dogs have lived with humans for thousands of years as working partners. By the nineteenth century their role expanded to companions. American dog literature reflects this gradual but dramatic shift that continues even today. Our household dogs are quite literally closer than ever to us: sleeping in...

Penelope's Poppy always wears khaki pants. When he finds a hole in one pair, he asks Penelope to patch it. Penelope likes to sew, but she soon realizes that mending the hole is more complicated than she first thought. Penelope struggles with the challenges and frustrations, but, with a little help...

Hemingway’s Brain is an innovative biography and the first forensic psychiatric examination of Nobel Prize–winning author Ernest Hemingway. After committing seventeen years to researching Hemingway’s life and medical history, Andrew Farah, a forensic psychiatrist, has concluded that the writer’s...

With the discipline of a surgeon performing a critical operation, acclaimed storyteller Harry Mark Petrakis strips away layers of his nine decades of life to expose the blood and bone of a human being in his third memoir and twenty-fifth book, Song of My Life. Petrakis is unsparing in exposing his...

The Poet's Holy Craft represents the first full-length analysis and interpretation of William Gilmore Simms's poetry. Matthew C. Brennan demonstrates the comprehensiveness of Simms's romanticism by examining Simms's poetics, his experimental sonnets, and his deep affinity to William Wordsworth, which...

Pulitzer Prizewinning author Michael Chabon has emerged as one of the most daring writers of American fiction in the post-Pynchon era. Joseph Dewey examines how Chabon’s narratives have sought to bring together the defining elements of the two principal expressions of the American narrative that...

Understanding Sam Shepard investigates the notoriously complex and confusing dramatic world of Sam Shepard, one of America’s most prolific, thoughtful, and challenging contemporary playwrights. During his nearly fifty-year career as a writer, actor, director, and producer, Shepard has consistently...

In this revised introduction to Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison’s novels, Jan Furman extends and updates her critical commentary. New chapters on four novels following the publication of Jazz in 1992 continue Furman’s explorations of Morrison’s themes and narrative strategies. In all Furman surveys...

Unvarnishing Reality draws original insight to the literature, politics, history, and culture of the cold war by closely examining the themes and goals of American and Russian satirical fiction. As Derek C. Maus illustrates, the paranoia of nuclear standoff provided a subversive storytelling mode...

Best known for his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Lonesome Dove and his Academy Award–winning screenplay for Brokeback Mountain, Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-nine novels, three memoirs, two collections of essays, and more than thirty screenplays. In Understanding Larry McMurtry, Steven...

What Marcel Proust wanted from life most of all was unconditional requited love, and the way he went after it―smothering the objects of his affection with gifts―cost him a fortune. To pay for such extravagance, he engaged in daring speculations on the stock exchange. The task of his cousin and...

Protagoras and Logos brings together in a meaningful synthesis the contributions and rhetoric of the first and most famous of the Older Sophists, Protagoras of Abdera. Most accounts of Protagoras rely on the somewhat hostile reports of Plato and Aristotle. By focusing on Protagoras's own surviving...