Horror is a genre of speculative fiction which is intended to frighten, scare, disgust, or startle its readers by inducing feelings of horror and terror. Literary historian J. A. Cuddon defined the horror story as "a piece of fiction in prose of variable length... which shocks, or even frightens the reader, or perhaps induces a feeling of repulsion or loathing". It creates an eerie and frightening atmosphere. Horror is frequently supernatural, though it can be non-supernatural. Often the central menace of a work of horror fiction can be interpreted as a metaphor for the larger fears of a society.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist, dark romantic, and short story writer.
To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by Harper Lee published in 1960. It was immediately successful, winning the Pulitzer Prize, and has become a classic of modern American literature. The plot and characters are loosely based on Lee's observations of her family, her neighbors and an event that occurred near her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, in 1936, when she was 10 years old.
The Scarlet Letter: A Romance, an 1850 novel, is a work of historical fiction written by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is considered his "masterwork". Set in 17th-century Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony, during the years 1642 to 1649, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter through an affair and struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. As she struggles to raise her rambunctious daughter, Pearl, on her own, the father of her child is revealed and is shown to be experiencing severe guilt. Through the scorn and judgment of the citizens and Roger Chillingworth, the two decide to remain together. Throughout the book, Hawthorne explores themes of legalism, sin, and guilt.
Paul Fussell, Jr. was an American cultural and literary historian, author and university professor. His writings cover a variety of topics, from scholarly works on eighteenth-century English literature to commentary on America's class system. Fussell served in the 103rd Infantry Division during World War II and was wounded in fighting in France. Returning to the US, Fussell wrote extensively and held several faculty positions, most prominently at Rutgers University (1955-1983) in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (1983-1994). He is best known for his writings about World War I and II, which explore what he felt was the gap between the romantic myth and reality of war; he made a "career out of refusing to disguise it or elevate it".
Julia Alvarez is a Dominican-American poet, novelist, and essayist. She rose to prominence with the novels How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), and Yo! (1997). Her publications as a poet include Homecoming (1984) and The Woman I Kept to Myself (2004), and as an essayist the autobiographical compilation Something to Declare (1998). Many literary critics regard her to be one of the most significant Latina writers and she has achieved critical and commercial success on an international scale.
Southern literature is defined as American literature about the Southern United States or by writers from this region. Traditionally, the study of southern literature has emphasized a common Southern history, the significance of family, a sense of community and one’s role within it, a sense of justice, the region's dominant religion, and the burdens/rewards religion often brings, issues of racial tension, land and the promise it brings, a sense of social class and place, and the use of the Southern dialect. However, since circa 2000, the scholarship of the New Southern Studies has decentralized these conventional tropes in favor of a more geographically, politically, and ideologically expansive "South" or "Souths."
African-American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of slave narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. African-American writers have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel Prize to Toni Morrison. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African-American culture, racism, slavery, and social equality. African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap.
Sara Jane Lippincott was an American author, poet, correspondent, lecturer, and newspaper founder. One of the first women to gain access into the Congressional press galleries, she used her questions to advocate for social reform and women's rights.
The House of the Seven Gables is a Gothic novel written beginning in mid-1850 by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne and published in April 1851 by Ticknor and Fields of Boston. The novel follows a New England family and their ancestral home. In the book, Hawthorne explores themes of guilt, retribution, and atonement, and colors the tale with suggestions of the supernatural and witchcraft. The setting for the book was inspired by the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion, a gabled house in Salem, MA, belonging to Hawthorne's cousin Susanna Ingersoll, and by ancestors of Hawthorne who had played a part in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. The book was well received upon publication and later had a strong influence on the work of H. P. Lovecraft. The House of the Seven Gables has been adapted several times to film and television.
Rita K. Gollin was born on January 22, 1928 in Brooklyn, NY. She attended Queens College for undergraduate studies before earning her Ph.D. in English from the University of Minnesota in 1961. Gollin is Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at the State University of New York at Geneseo. Gollin is a scholar of the life and works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, on whom she has authored several books and many articles. Her 1979 book, Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Truth of Dreams, published by the Louisiana State University Press, is consistently included on Hawthorne bibliographies. Her later publications pursued visual-textual studies, focusing on the iconography of Hawthorne portraiture, and a biography of Hawthorne's publisher's wife, "Annie Adams Fields, Woman of Letters." Gollin has also edited scholarly editions of Hawthorne's best-known novel, The Scarlet Letter. Her awards and services include NEH grants, and Presidencies of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society and of the Northeast MLA.
Atticus Finch is a fictional character in Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird. A preliminary version of the character also appears in the novel Go Set a Watchman, written in the mid 1950s but not published until 2015. Atticus is a lawyer and resident of the fictional Maycomb County, Alabama, and the father of Jeremy "Jem" Finch and Jean Louise "Scout" Finch. Lee based the character on her own father, Amasa Coleman Lee, an Alabama lawyer, who, like Atticus, represented black defendants in a highly publicized criminal trial. Book Magazine's list of The 100 Best Characters in Fiction Since 1900 names Finch as the seventh best fictional character of 20th-century literature. In 2003 the American Film Institute voted Atticus Finch, as portrayed in an Academy Award-winning performance by Gregory Peck in the 1962 film adaptation, as the greatest hero of all American cinema. In the 2018 Broadway stage play adapted by Aaron Sorkin, Finch is portrayed by Jeff Daniels.
Jonis Agee is a writer of short stories, novels, essays, and screenplays. She is the author of thirteen books, including five novels and five collections of short fiction. Three of her books have been New York Times Notable Books.
Mockingbird is a young adult novel by American author Kathryn Erskine about a autistic girl coping with the loss of her brother. It won the 2010 U.S. National Book Award for Young People's Literature. In 2012 it was awarded the Dolly Gray Children's Literature Award.
Brenda Wineapple is an American nonfiction writer, literary critic, and essayist who has written several books on nineteenth century American writers.
Donald E. Pease is the Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities, Chair of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. He is an Americanist, literary and cultural critic, and academic. He has been a member of the boundary 2 editorial collective since 1977 or 1978. He was the founding editor of the New Americanist Series at Duke University Press and editor of the Re-Encountering Colonialism Series and Re-Mapping the Transnational Turn: A Dartmouth Series in American Studies for the University Press of New England (UPNE). Pease directs the annual Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth.
Jean Constance D'Costa is a Jamaican children's novelist, linguist, and professor emeritus. Her novels for children aged 11 to 13 have been praised for their use of both Jamaican Creole and Standard English.
The literature of Alabama, United States, includes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Representative authors include Fannie Flagg and Harper Lee.
Emily Greenwood is a Professor of Classics and African-American Studies and Chair of the Department of Classics at Yale University. Her research focuses on Ancient Greek historiography, particularly Thucydides and Herodotus, and the development of History as a genre and a modern critical discipline. She also explores the appropriation and reinvention of Greco-Roman classical antiquity from the late nineteenth century to the present.
