Research Catalog

Title

Pat Conroy : a critical companion / Landon C. Burns.

Author

Burns, Landon C.

Publication

Westport, CT : Greenwood Press, 1996.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xiii, 195 pages; 24 cm.

Summary

• No one who has read Pat Conroy's novels of family wounds and healing can fail to be moved by their emotional appeal. But Conroy is also a major contemporary American novelist who follows in the tradition of Southern fiction established by William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe. This companion is the first book-length study of his work. It explores the recurring motifs in his fiction and his special writing talents as a prose stylist of uncommon distinction.
• A separate chapter for The Boo and The Water Is Wide and each novel - The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, The Prince of Tides, and his most recent, Beach Music - provides a detailed analysis of the books and the common threads that unite all the novels.
• A biographical chapter draws connections between Conroy's life and the autobiographical nature of his fiction. A chapter on genre traces Conroy's roots in Southern fiction and shows how all the novels fall into the rite-of-passage genre. Each novel is analyzed for plot structure, characterization, thematic elements, and Conroy's increasingly elaborate style and development as a master of the art of the novel.
• In addition, Burns defines and applies a variety of alternative approaches to the novels to widen the reader's perspective. A complete bibliography of Conroy's fiction as well as selected reviews and criticism complete the work. Because of Pat Conroy's popularity among adults and teenagers, this first critical work of a major contemporary American writer is a necessary purchase for public and secondary school libraries.

Series Statement

Critical companions to popular contemporary writers, 1074 -4193

Uniform Title

Critical companions to popular contemporary writers.

Subject

• Conroy, Pat > Criticism and interpretation

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Series Foreword / Kathleen Gregory Klein -- 1. The Life of Pat Conroy -- 2. Genres -- 3. The Boo (1970) and The Water Is Wide (1972) -- 4. The Great Santini (1976) -- 5. The Lords of Discipline (1980) -- 6. The Prince of Tides (1986) -- 7. Beach Music (1995).

ISBN

0313294194 (alk. paper)

LCCN

95039495

OCLC

• 33407915
• ocm33407915

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries