Steinbeck

"The main objective of the work is to study the similarities between Demna Shengelaia’s 'Buried Treasure' and John Steinbeck’s 'The Pearl'. The article presents a comparative analysis of these stories. The work deals with the concept of ‘buried treasure’ in the 20th century American and Georgian literature. It also deals with man’s destiny in the socialist and the capitalist society.''

John Steinbeck’s The Pearl is one of the most popular and most frequently taught of all American novellas. Although it began its life as a brief parable, an allegorical novella about a poor fisherman finding a pearl, becoming greedy, and subsequently suffering a job-like loss, it has remained in the literary conversation for nearly three-quarters of a century for reasons that seem to exceed its original goals. Its Mexican setting, in a location not far from California, gives it a particular interest today as the United States becomes increasingly multicultural. The present volume examines the book from numerous perspectives – historical, cultural, social, economic, ethnic, and literary. This book in the Critical Insights series explores the many factors that have made Steinbeck’s short novel so enduringly appealing, examining the history of the work’s critical reception while also contributing new insights that have not been pursued before.

For all these reasons and more, this latest contribution to the Critical Insights series may be of special interest to many readers. A collection of four critical context essays are intended to treat Steinbeck's novella:

From a historical vantage point
In terms of its critical reception
Using a specific critical lens
By comparing and contrasting it with other important works
The Critical Contexts section opens with an essay by Melinda Knight that discusses Steinbeck's vision of Mexico in the context of The Pearl. This is followed by a survey of critical reception, also by Melinda Knight, and an essay by Kyler Campbell, closely and critically examining Steinbeck's work. James Plath closes this section by using a comparative approach to continue the discussion on The Pearl, particularly in comparison to Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea.

The Critical Readings section of this book contains the following essays:

* Of Mollusks and Men: An Ecocritical Approach to The Pearl, Lowell Wyse
* "This Is the Whole": Ecological Thinking in John Steinbeck's The Pearl, Christopher Bowman
* Steps to a Littoral Ecology: Community and Nature in John Steinbeck's The Pearl, Michael Zeitler
* The Song of Inequality: Sickness and Wealth in Steinbeck's The Pearl, Jericho Williams
* "The Detachment of God": A Theopoetic Reading of Steinbeck's The Pearl, Kelly C. MacPhail
* Surrendering: Steinbeck's The Pearl as an Artistic Failure, John J. Han
* Who Stole Kino's Cheese? Socioeconomic Determinism in The Pearl, Arun Khevariya
* The Portrayal of "Poverty People" in John Steinbeck's The Pearl and Tortilla Flat, Emily P. Hamburger
* A Comparative Exploration of Devaluation of Women, Ownership, and Violence in John Steinbeck's The Chrysanthemums and The Pearl, Elisabeth Bayley
* Culture, Identity, and Otherness: An Analysis of Kino's Songs in John Steinbeck's The Pearl and Pilate's Melody in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Tammie Jenkins

In the final section, Resources, a Chronology of John Steinbeck's Life and a list of other Works by John Steinbeck are provided. Also included in this volume is a Bibliography, biographies of the Editor and Contributors, and an alphabetical Index.

The Critical Insights Series distills the best of both classic and current literary criticism of the world's most studied literature. Edited and written by some of academia's most distinguished literary scholars, Critical Insights: The Pearl provides authoritative, in-depth scholarship that students and researchers will rely on for years. This volume is destined to become a valuable purchase for all.

Written during his time living in Monterey, Steinbeck's early novel To a God Unknown (1933) may be used as a hermeneutic for assessing his metaphysics, which he developed from observations of natural cycles with marine biologist Ed Ricketts and a young Joseph Campbell. Their philosophical approach to the world—which Steinbeck describes as “speculative metaphysics” in The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951)—emphasizes a holism that includes spirituality, ecology, and psychology. Steinbeck articulates this conception of reality in To a God Unknown. These beliefs and the vocabulary Steinbeck uses to describe them are heavily influenced by the company he kept—Ricketts and Campbell. A close reading of this novel illuminates his use of a cyclical organizing schema in the form of a recurring trope: a pine glade embedded with spirit that lends an ebb-and-flow pattern to the characters' psychological behavior and physical actions. The cyclical return of this important trope has thus fa...

Within a postmodern ecocritical framework, the present paper seeks to examine John Steinbeck's ecocentric vision in his last novel The Winter of Our Discontent (1961). The paper analyzes the novel from an ecocritical perspective, showing how man's connectedness with nature highlights postmodern phenomena of identity crisis, disintegration, alienation, and deterioration of ethics. Within this framework, nature asserts itself as man's 'place,' companion, solace, and refuge from a rapidly changing American society during the 1950s and 1960s in which the heavy grip of capitalism and consumerism was felt. The paper argues that The Winter of Our Discontent foregrounds the concept of interdependence that governs the relationship between human beings and the environment, thus emphasizing Steinbeck's ecocentric vision that destabilizes the dichotomous notion that man is superior to nature. Here, the ontological landscape of a man searching for a lost disintegrated ide...

This article proposes a form of research that integrates reader study with textual analysis. Its purpose is to investigate the social production of literary value, potentially providing cultural sociology with a systematic means by which to study the formal features of texts in relation to their social significance: a means arguably required by (but not necessarily supplied in) the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of reading group (or ‘book club’) discussions reveals an association between descriptive writing, cultural legitimacy, and a focus on the form, rather than the content, of fictional texts. In order to understand this association, the analysis then turns to two paragraphs from John Steinbeck’s The Pearl (2000 [1946]), which had been read by most of the groups involved and which many group members had referred to as involving ‘description’. It is argued that a long-standing tradition of association between descriptive writing and visual art has served as a resource both for consumers and for producers in distinguishing literature from popular fiction.

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