Bloom's Modern Critical Views - Norman Mailer (2003) (271p) [Inua].pdf

Title: Norman Mailer (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
Editors: Pamela Loos & Harold Bloom
Series: Bloom's Modern Critical Views
Hardcover: 262 pages
Publisher: Chelsea House Pub (L) (April 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0791074420
ISBN-13: 978-0791074428

Description:
Essays of critical interpretation portray views of Norman Mailer's work, including Of a Fire on the Moon, Barbary Shore, and Tough Guys Don't Dance.

Editor’s Note
My Introduction attempts canonical judgement upon Mailer’s work.
Alvin B. Kernan’s essay in Of a Fire on the Moon sees Mailer as an elegist marking the death of Romantic art at the hands of scientific myth.
My review essay upon Ancient Evenings, that vast panoply of humbuggery and bumbuggery, centers itself upon Mailer’s highly individual phantasmagoria of death, copulation, and rebirth.
Richard Poirier also concerns himself with Ancient Evenings, which he surprisingly compares to William Faulkner and Joseph Conrad, not in my judgement an elevation Mailer’s novel can sustain.
In a retrospective view Stacey Olster commends Mailer for his agonistic spirit, after which Gabriel Miller finds in the early work a similar sense of defiance.
Nigel Leigh goes back to the Trotskyite Barbary Shore, as anarchistic as it is Marxist, while Peter Balbert juxtaposes The Deer Park with D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, another comparison, I fear, that diminishes Mailer.
In a brilliant essay on The Executioner’s Song, Mark Edmundson uncovers Mailer’s renewal of High Romantic self-creation, after which Joseph Tabbi praises Mailer’s career, while noting its limitations in addressing psychological and technological issues.
Mailer’s imitation of the detective traditions is judged by Robert Merrill to be a success, which seems to me overpraise of Tough Guys Don’t Dance. Kathy Smith centers upon Mailer’s quest to convert nonfictional writing to literary possibilities.
Michael K. Glenday takes us back to Mailer’s first novel, The Naked and the Dead, in order to trace the seeds there of all future Mailer.
In this volume’s final essay, John Whalen-Bridge discusses the myth of the American Adam in later Mailer, connecting this to the perpetual agon of God and the Devil in Mailer’s literary cosmos.