McTeague: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton Critical Editions) - Softcover

Norris, Frank

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393970132 ISBN 13: 9780393970135

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996

Synopsis

The text of this edition presents, fully annotated, the 1899 First Edition text of McTeague, a significant example of American literary naturalism and a commentary on turn-of-the-century American cultural values.

Contexts focuses on the novel's sources and composition. Included are newspaper accounts of a San Francisco murder; a description of Norris' Polk Street neighborhood, which figures prominently in McTeague; an examination of the relationship between the novel and naturalism; and a discussion of the book's genesis, from its origin as a Harvard assignment to Norris's revision of it upon his return to San Francisco. Criticism has been revised to include major recent assessments of the novel. Two seminal pieces from the previous edition have been retained―Ernest Marchand's account of McTeague's 1899 reviews and Donald Pizer's essay on naturalism. Six essays and four stills from Erich von Stroheim's film version of McTeague are new. The new essays are by Don Graham, William E. Cain, Barbara Hochman, James L. Caron, Mary Lawlor, and Donna M. Campbell. A Chronology and an updated Selected Bibliography are included. Illustrated

About this title

Review:

The novelist Frank Norris is almost forgotten today, but in books like "McTeague," published in 1899, he paved the way for a whole generation of American writers--a generation that included Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis and, less directly, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. McTeague is a dentist saddled with a grasping wife, and the book chronicles his rise and fall in awkward but powerful prose. This type of social realism, so contrary to the uplifting entertainment of the day (and to Mark Twain's more fanciful, comic novels), provided turn-of-the-century America a disturbing mirror in which to view itself.

From the Inside Flap:

An unflinchingly realistic portrayal of the moral descent of a San Francisco dentist, McTeague, first published in 1899, helped to propel American literature into the twentieth century. "The novel glows in a light that makes it the first great tragic portrait in America of an acquisitive society," writes Alfred Kazin in the Introduction to this Modern Library Paperback Classic. "McTeague's San Francisco is the underworld of that society, and the darkness of its tragedy, its pitilessness, its grotesque humor, is like the rumbling of hell. Nothing is more remarkable in the book than the detachment with which Norris saw it—a tragedy almost literally classic in the Greek sense of the debasement of a powerful man—and nothing gives it so much power."

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0393970132
• ISBN 13: 9780393970135
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 432
• Editor: Pizer Donald