With a foreword by John N. Maclean, son of Norman Maclean

The Writings of Norman Maclean: Seeking Truth amid Tragedy provides the first critical reassessment of this celebrated author’s work in more than a decade. In his study, Timothy P. Schilling focuses on Maclean’s attempt, in A River Runs through It and Other Stories and Young Men and Fire, to come to grips with the tragic side of human existence. From the 1938 death of his brother Paul to the 1949 deaths of thirteen firefighters in Montana’s Mann Gulch wildfire, Maclean is driven by a desire to discover ultimate meaning—the truth—in the face of haunting tragedy. Through careful analysis of all of Maclean’s published works, Schilling highlights the audaciousness of Maclean’s quest to wrest free an answer from “the universe.” 

Ever open to scientific, literary, philosophical, and theological ways of viewing reality, Maclean found ambiguity, paradoxically, to be an essential tool for probing the truth. Beyond exploring Maclean’s use of this tool, Schilling breaks new ground by considering Maclean’s invocation of the Transcendentals in “A River Runs through It,” noting the sly homage Maclean pays to Izaak Walton, examining Maclean’s often-neglected “Other Stories,” assessing Robert Redford’s film adaptation of “A River Runs through It,” and providing the most thorough exploration of Young Men and Fire yet available.

With this book, Schilling offers a current and complete analysis of Maclean—one of the most iconic figures in Western American literature.

Written Voices, Spoken Signs is a stimulating introduction to new perspectives on Homer and other traditional epics. Taking advantage of recent research on language and social exchange, the nine essays in this volume focus on performance and audience reception of oral poetry.

These innovative essays by leading scholars of Homer, oral poetics, and epic invite us to rethink some key concepts for an understanding of traditional epic poetry. Egbert Bakker examines the epic performer's use of time and tense in recounting a past that is alive. Tackling the question of full-length performance of the monumental Iliad, Andrew Ford considers the extent to which the work was perceived as a coherent whole in the archaic age. John Miles Foley addresses questions about spoken signs and the process of reference in epic discourse, and Ahuvia Kahane studies rhythm as a semantic factor in the Homeric performance. Richard Martin suggests a new range of performance functions for the Homeric simile. And Gregory Nagy establishes the importance of one feature of epic language, the ellipsis. These six essays centered on Homer engage with fundamental issues that are addressed by three essays primarily concerned with medieval epic: those by Franz Bäuml on the concept of fact; by Wulf Oesterreicher on types of orality; and by Ursula Schaefer on written and spoken media. In their Introduction the editors highlight the underlying approach and viewpoints of this collaborative volume.

Dennis Cooper is one of the most inventive and prolific artists of our time. Working in a variety of forms and media since he first exploded onto the scene in the early 1970s, he has been a punk poet, a queercore novelist, a transgressive blogger, an indie filmmaker—each successive incarnation more ingenious and surprising than the last. Cooper’s unflinching determination to probe the obscure, often violent recesses of the human psyche have seen him compared with literary outlaws like Rimbaud, Genet, and the Marquis de Sade.

In this, the first book-length study of Cooper’s life and work, Diarmuid Hester shows that such comparisons hardly scratch the surface. A lively retrospective appraisal of Cooper’s fifty-year career, Wrong tracks the emergence of Cooper’s singular style alongside his participation in a number of American subcultural movements like New York School poetry, punk rock, and radical queercore music and zines. Using extensive archival research, close readings of texts, and new interviews with Cooper and his contemporaries, Hester weaves a complex and often thrilling biographical narrative that attests to Cooper’s status as a leading figure of the American post­–War avant-garde.