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Appealing to readers of Menand's The Metaphysical Club and McCullough's The Greater Journey, Portrait of a Novel provides a brilliant account of the greatest American novel of expatriate life ever written. 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Naipaul and Salman Rushdie - have charted the perpetually drawn and perpetually blurred boundaries of identity in the wake of British imperialism. Arguing against a model of cultural identity based on race, Gorra begins with Scott's portrait, in \"The Raj Quartet\", of the character Hari Kumar - a seeming oxymoron, an \"English boy with a dark brown skin\", whose very existence undercuts the belief in an absolute distinction between England and India. He then considers the different figures of Naipaul and Rushdie, two novelists of the Indian diaspora. Whereas Naipaul's long and controversial career is said to map the \"deep disorder\" spread by imperialism and its passing, Rushdie demonstrates that certain consequences of that disorder, such as migrancy and mimicry, have themselves become creative forces. The readings of postcolonial fiction included in this study demonstrate how imperialism helped shape British national identity, and how, after the end of empire, that identity must be reconfigured.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50345965551889,"sku":"CIN0226304752G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226304752.jpg?v=1750940762"},{"product_id":"bells-in-their-silence-book-michael-gorra-9780691126173","title":"The Bells in Their Silence","description":"Nobody writes travelogues about Germany. The country spurs many anxious volumes of investigative reporting--books that worry away at the \"German problem,\" World War II, the legacy of the Holocaust, the Wall, reunification, and the connections between them. But not travel books, not the free-ranging and impressionistic works of literary nonfiction we associate with V. S. Naipaul and Bruce Chatwin. What is it about Germany and the travel book that puts them seemingly at odds? With one foot in the library and one on the street, Michael Gorra offers both an answer to this question and his own traveler's tale of Germany. Gorra uses Goethe's account of his Italian journey as a model for testing the traveler's response to Germany today, and he subjects the shopping arcades of contemporary German cities to the terms of Benjamin's Arcades project. He reads post-Wende Berlin through the novels of Theodor Fontane, examines the role of figurative language, and enlists W. G. Sebald as a guide to the place of fragments and digressions in travel writing. Replete with the flaneur's chance discoveries--and rich in the delights of the enduring and the ephemeral, of architecture and flood--The Bells in Their Silence offers that rare traveler's tale of Germany while testing the very limits of the travel narrative as a literary form.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50360868176145,"sku":"CIN0691126178G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52736570294545,"sku":"NIN9780691126173","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0691126178.jpg?v=1750880883"},{"product_id":"the-saddest-words-william-faulkner-s-civil-war-cd-9781696600361","title":"The Saddest Words","description":"\u003cp\u003eWilliam Faulkner, one of America's most iconic writers, is an author who defies easy interpretation. Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such classic novels as \u003ci\u003eAbsolom, Absolom \u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Sound and The Fury\u003c\/i\u003e, creating in Yoknapatawpha county one of the most memorable gallery of characters ever assembled in American literature. Yet, as acclaimed literary critic Michael Gorra explains, Faulkner has sustained justified criticism for his failures of racial nuance--his ventriloquism of black characters and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South--demanding that we reevaluate the Nobel laureate's life and legacy in the twenty-first century, as we reexamine the junctures of race and literature in works that once rested firmly in the American canon.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eInterweaving biography, literary criticism, and rich travelogue, \u003ci\u003eThe Saddest Words\u003c\/i\u003e argues that even despite these contradictions--and perhaps because of them--William Faulkner still needs to be read, and even more, remains central to understanding the contradictions inherent in the American experience itself. Evoking Faulkner's biography and his literary characters, Gorra illuminates what Faulkner maintained was the South's curse and its separate destiny, a class and racial system built on slavery that was devastated during the Civil War and was reimagined thereafter through the South's revanchism. Driven by currents of violence, a Lost Cause romanticism not only defined Faulkner's twentieth century but now even our own age.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThrough Gorra's critical lens, Faulkner's mythic Yoknapatawpha County comes alive as his imagined land finds itself entwined in America's history, the characters wrestling with the ghosts of a past that refuses to stay buried, stuck in an unending cycle between those two saddest words, was and again. Upending previous critical traditions, \u003ci\u003eThe Saddest Words\u003c\/i\u003e returns Faulkner to his sociopolitical context, revealing the civil war within him and proving that the real war lies not only in the physical combat, but also in the war after the war, the war over its memory and meaning.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFilled with vignettes of Civil War battles and generals, vivid scenes from Gorra's travels through the South--including Faulkner's Oxford, Mississippi--and commentaries on Faulkner's fiction, \u003ci\u003eThe Saddest Words\u003c\/i\u003e is a mesmerizing work of literary thought that recontextualizes Faulkner in light of the most plangent cultural issues facing America today.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50387922780433,"sku":"CIN1696600367VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1696600367.jpg?v=1750801387"},{"product_id":"portrait-of-a-novel-book-michael-gorra-9780871404084","title":"Portrait of a Novel","description":"Henry James (1843-1916) has had many biographers but Michael Gorra has taken an original approach to this great American progenitor of the modern novel, combining elements of biography, criticism and travelogue in re-creating the dramatic backstory of James’s masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady (1881). Gorra shows how this scandalous story came to be written. Travelling to Italy, France and England, he sheds new light on James’s family, the European literary circles of George Eliot, Flaubert and Turgenev in which James made his name, and the psychological forces that enabled him to create the most memorable female protagonist. A piercing detective story, Portrait of a Novel provides a brilliant account of the greatest American novel of expatriate life ever written.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50478837432593,"sku":"CIN0871404087G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50478837629201,"sku":"GOR007050145","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50670725366033,"sku":"CIN0871404087VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51295948800273,"sku":"GOR005405083","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0871404087.jpg?v=1751446043"},{"product_id":"bells-in-their-silence-book-michael-gorra-9780691117652","title":"The Bells in Their Silence","description":"Nobody writes travelogues about Germany. The country spurs many anxious volumes of investigative reporting - books that worry away at the 'German problem,' World War II, the legacy of the Holocaust, the Wall, reunification, and the connections between them. But not travel books, not the free-ranging and impressionistic works of literary nonfiction we associate with V. S. Naipaul and Bruce Chatwin. What is it about Germany and the travel book that puts them seemingly at odds? With one foot in the library and one on the street, Michael Gorra offers both an answer to this question and his own traveler's tale of Germany. Gorra uses Goethe's account of his Italian journey as a model for testing the traveler's response to Germany today, and he subjects the shopping arcades of contemporary German cities to the terms of Benjamin's Arcades project.He reads post-Wende Berlin through the novels of Theodor Fontane, examines the role of figurative language, and enlists W.G. Sebald as a guide to the place of fragments and digressions in travel writing. Replete with the flaneur's chance discoveries - and rich in the delights of the enduring and the ephemeral, of architecture and flood - \"The Bells in Their Silence\" offers that rare traveler's tale of Germany while testing the very limits of the travel narrative as a literary form.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50561562902801,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50561562968337,"sku":"GOR003748842","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0691117659.jpg?v=1751440111"},{"product_id":"english-novel-at-mid-century-book-michael-gorra-9781349114597","title":"The English Novel at Mid-Century","description":"'So far as the young were concerned,' Orwell wrote of Britain in the years after the Great War, 'the official beliefs were dissolving like sandcastles.' Most critical accounts of that postwar generation have been constrained by having to deal with the myth of the 'thirties.' Michael Gorra's innovation in this exciting study of the postwar generation's major novelists lies in seeing the consequences of that dissolution in formal rather than political terms, arguing that the novelist's difficulty in representing human character in what Wyndham Lewis called a 'shell-shocked' age is itself a sign of that loss of belief. But while most studies of this generation end with the coming of World War 2, Gorra follows these novelists throughout their careers. The result is a book that not only shows how the British novel's increasing consciousness of its own limitations stands as a mirror to the country's loss of power, but also provides memorable portraits of four major twentieth century writers.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52589946732817,"sku":"NLS9781349114597","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781349114597.jpg?v=1761061112"},{"product_id":"english-novel-at-mid-century-book-michael-gorra-9780333522424","title":"The English Novel at Mid-Century","description":"'So far as the young were concerned,' Orwell wrote of Britain in the years after the Great War, 'the official beliefs were dissolving like sandcastles.' Most critical accounts of that postwar generation have been constrained by having to deal with the myth of the 'thirties.' Michael Gorra's innovation in this exciting study of the postwar generation's major novelists lies in seeing the consequences of that dissolution in formal rather than political terms, arguing that the novelist's difficulty in representing human character in what Wyndham Lewis called a 'shell-shocked' age is itself a sign of that loss of belief. But while most studies of this generation end with the coming of World War 2, Gorra follows these novelists throughout their careers. The result is a book that not only shows how the British novel's increasing consciousness of its own limitations stands as a mirror to the country's loss of power, but also provides memorable portraits of four major twentieth century writers.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52599167549713,"sku":"NLS9780333522424","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52734971183377,"sku":"NIN9780333522424","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780333522424.jpg?v=1761077664"},{"product_id":"storytellers-book-michael-gorra-9780226825557","title":"The Storytellers","description":"Tracing the origins of the modern short story, Michael Gorra provides the first fully realized picture of a century’s worth of great tales.   The Storytellers offers a far-reaching account of the rich tradition of short narratives that flourished in nineteenth-century Europe and America, one that both prepared for and eventually gave way to the modern short story. Tracing unexpected resemblances across languages and decades, Michael Gorra restores a wide-angle view of the form in which works usually treated as stand-alone classics reveal themselves as parts of a single, lively conversation.  What unites these tales, Gorra argues, is their blend of novelty and unity. The book’s heart lies in a series of accessible readings of great tales by Herman Melville, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Guy de Maupassant, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, and many more. Beyond its consideration of individual works, The Storytellers examines the formal and thematic concerns that bind the century together: the use of frame tales, accounts of social marginality, and an abundance of ghosts and uncanny coincidences. Over time, Gorra shows, these qualities yielded to a cooler realism, with Anton Chekhov as the key transitional figure. His compressed studies of ordinary lives inspired the modern short story and consigned the gothic flourishes of earlier tales to genre fiction.  What do we want from a story? What makes a tale worth telling? The nineteenth-century tale sought not the grand “meaning of life” promised by the novel, Gorra shows, but sudden revelations from singular events. The Storytellers gives readers an incomparable guide to a vast body of tales that still has the power to thrill and entertain.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53389092225297,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":53389092913425,"sku":"NGR9780226825557","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780226825557.jpg?v=1775648376"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-michael-gorra.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}