Nothing Abstract: Investigations in the American Literary Imagination - Tapa dura

I admire the essays for inspiring a new generation of scholars to appreciate the value, the necessity, of studying a book in the context of the genetic history of the text, understanding the process of creation, revision, editing, publication, and scholarly editing that leads to the novel that is read today....The essays on Twain are absolutely superb, and I am inspired by what he has done with Cather and Fitzgerald. Quirk's genetic investigations have a value that is immediately apparent, and his articles stand without further justification. - James Nagel

Written by one of the leading scholars in the field, Nothing Abstract is a collection of essays gathered over the past twenty years - all of which, in some fashion, have to do with a genetic approach to literary study. In previous books, the author has traced and discussed the compositional histories of certain literary works. In this book, Tom Quirk takes a stand against the direction taken by modern critical theory and sets forth his approach to literature through source and influence study, the evolution of a certain writer's career, the establishment of biographical or other contexts, and the transition from one literary era to another. All of the essays that Quirk has chosen for this collection illustrate a scholarly method. The first two essays, somewhat general in their concerns, constitute a defense for the genetic method, and subsequent essays serve as evidence for the usefulness of genetic inquiry. The entire volume resists poststructuralist and later theory not through active confrontation, but merely by being what it is and doing what it does. More important though is that all of the chosen essays are intrinsically interesting. They tell fascinating stories - stories about literary genesis, biographical circumstances, and artistic ambitions and achievement. Authors discussed at length are Edgar Allan Poe, Tony Hillerman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Wallace Stevens, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Joyce Carol Oates. Quirk also touches on Flannery O'Connor, Richard Wright, Robert Frost, Jack London, Stephen Crane, William Faulkner, and others. Nothing Abstract makes a great contribution to the study of important American writers and will be welcomed by all students and scholars of American studies and American literature.