CRITICISM

Armstrong, Nancy, and Leonard Tennenhouse, eds. The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence. London: Routledge, 1989, 263 pp.

Collection of essays by various contributors featuring a historical survey of literary representations of violence from the early modern era to the contemporary period.

Black, Joel. The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991, 276 pp.

Examines modern texts “that present murder from an aesthetic rather than from a moral, psychological, or philosophical perspective.”

Foster, David William. Violence in Argentine Literature: Cultural Responses to Tyranny. Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1995, 208 pp.

Includes several essays analyzing Argentine novels of 1976 to 1983—a period of military dictatorship and cultural repression—and of the subsequent years of increasing democratization.

Fraser, John. Violence in the Arts. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1974, 192 pp.

Study of the cultural fascination with violence in literature and film of the twentieth century.

Gossett, Louise Y. Violence in Recent Southern Fiction. Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1965, 207 p.

Discusses the dominant theme of violence in the fiction of the American South since 1930, highlighting the work of Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, William Styron, Carson McCullers, and others.

Kennelly, Brendan. “Poetry and Violence” In History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Literature, edited by Joris Duytschaever and Geert Lernout, pp. 5-28. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988.

Considers violence arising from historical, political, and sexual tyranny and oppression as it is represented in Anglo-Irish poetry.

Kowalewski, Michael. Deadly Musings: Violence and Verbal Form in American Fiction. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1993, 301 p.

Explores the style and language of violence in works of American fiction writers from James Fenimore Cooper to Thomas Pynchon.