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Surely one of America's most popular novelists, Stephen King has only recently begun to receive serious attention from scholars and literary critics.
The Dark Descent assembles fifteen illuminating original essays that consider King from a variety of intellectual orientations, addressing the major novels and central thematic concerns that represent King's contributions to American letters and elevating King scholarship to a new level of critical discourse. This volume places King firmly within the canon of contemporary American fiction.
The essayists are concerned with explicating the meanings of individual narratives and creating critical contexts for their interpretion. While covering a broad range of his works and using multiple theoretical approaches--including reader-response, mythic, psychoanalytic, and structuralist criticism--to offer insights into King's fiction, most of the essayists reflect on one of two central theses: that King's body of literature may be seen as having been deeply influenced by the mainstream traditions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and European fictions, and that the narratives may be read as profound commentary on the major political and social tensions shaping contemporary American life. King's supernatural horrors reflect actual horrors, and his compelling style makes art out of horror fiction. A King chronology, bibliography and an expository introduction flank the analytical essays.
List of contents
Foreword by Joseph A. Citro
Chronology
Defining King's Horrorscape: An Introduction by Tony Magistrale
The Masks of the Goddess: The Unfolding of the Female Archetype in Stephen King's CARRIE by Greg Weller
Partners in the DANSE: Women in Stephen King's Fiction by Mary Pharr
Complex, Archetype, and Primal Fear: King's Use of Fairy Tales in THE SHINING by Ronald T. Curran
The Three Genres of THE STAND by Edwin F. Casebeer
Some Ways of Reading THE DEAD ZONE by Michael N. Stanton
Fear and Pity: Tragic Horror in King's PET SEMATARY by Leonard Mustazza
The Mythic Journey in "The Body" by Arthur W. Biddle
"Everybody Pays . . . Even for Things They Didn't Do": Stephen King's Pay-out in the Bachman Novels by James F. Smith
Science, Politics, and the Epic Imagination: THE TALISMAN by Tony Magistrale
A Clockwork Evil: Guilt and Coincidence in "The Monkey" by Gene Doty
Playing the Heavy: Weight, Appetite, and Embodiment in Three Novels by Stephen King by Bernadette Bosky
Riddle Game: Stephen King's Metafictive Dialogue by Jeanne Campbell Reesman
Stephen King Reading William Faulkner: Memory, Desire, and Time in the Making of IT by Mary Jane Dickerson
"The Face of Mr. Flip": Homophobia in the Horror of Stephen King by Douglas Keesey
Reading, Writing and Interpreting: Stephen King's MISERY by Lauri Berkenkamp
A Stephen King Bibliography
Index
About the author
Tony Magistrale is Professor of English former chair of the English Department at University of Vermont, USA. Over the past three decades, Magistrale’s twenty-three books and many articles have covered a broad area of interests. The majority of his books and articles have centered on defining and tracing Anglo-American Gothicism, from its origins in eighteenth-century romanticism to its contemporary manifestations in popular culture, particularly in the work of Stephen King. He has published three separate interviews with Stephen King, and from 2005-09 Magistrale served as a research assistant to Mr. King. Accordingly, a dozen of his scholarly books and many published journal articles have illuminated the genre’s narrative themes, psychological and social contexts, and historical development. He is frequently cited in scholarly books dealing with the interdisciplinary aspects of American horror art, and has been interviewed and/or profiled on PBS television; ABC Radio, Australia; Vermont Public Radio; German Public Radio, ARD; North Carolina Public Radio; Ocean Light Productions, and by the following national and international newspapers and magazines: The New Yorker, Cinescape, The National Review, The Miami Herald, Pacific Standard, The Boston Globe, Houston Chronicle, The Baltimore Sun, New York Daily News, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The St. Petersburg Times, Movie Geeks United!, Lighthouse Media One (England), Oggi (Italy), Las Ultimas Noticias (Chile), and L’Express (France).
Tony Magistrale is professor and chair of the English department at the University of Vermont.
