The Red Badge of Courage: An Authoritative Text Backgrounds and Sources Criticism (Norton Critical Editions) - Softcover

Crane, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393964302 ISBN 13: 9780393964301

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1993

Synopsis

The text of this Norton Critical Edition is that of the first edition of the novel, published by D. Appleton & Company in 1895, conservatively emended. As in previous editions, Crane’s uncancelled but unpublished manuscript pages, including his discarded Chapter XII, are presented in an appendix. To assist the reader, the editor has annotated obscure terms and allusions.

Backgrounds and Sources contains biographical, historical, and contextual material on both The Red Badge of Courage and the war fiction genre.

Frederick Crews, Donald Pizer, Harold R. Hungerford, Eric Solomon, and J. C. Levenson provide the framework for understanding the novel as both literature and history.

A selection of Stephen Crane’s letters and an illustration from the battle of Chancellorsville, upon which the novel is based, are also included.

Criticism is a collection of fourteen essays (six of them new to the Third Edition) representing the best of what has been written about The Red Badge of Courage, from the earliest estimates to the expressions of current schools of critical interpretation.

Early assessments by Stephen Crane (in a self-judgment), George Wyndham, and Frank Norris are accompanied by those of mid- to late-twentieth-century critics R. W. Stallman, John E. Hart, Charles C. Walcutt, John Fraser, Robert M. Rechnitz, Harry B. Henderson, James Nagel, Donald Pizer, Amy Kaplan, David Halliburton, and James Cox.

A new Chronology and an updated Selected Bibliography are also included.

About this title

From the Publisher:

"The Red Badge Of Courage has long been considered the first great 'modern' novel of war by an American-the first novel of literary distinction to present war without heroics and this in a spirit of total irony and skepticism."

From the Inside Flap:

First published in 1895, America's greatest novel of the Civil War was written before 21-year-old Stephen Crane had "smelled even the powder of a sham battle." But this powerful psychological study of a young soldier's struggle with the horrors, both within and without, that war strikes the reader with its undeniable realism and with its masterful descriptions of the moment-by-moment riot of emotions felt by me under fire. Ernest Hemingway called the novel an American classic, and Crane's genius is as much apparent in his sharp, colorful prose as in his ironic portrayal of an episode of war so intense, so immediate, so real that the terror of battle becomes our own ... in a masterpiece so unique that many believe modern American fiction began with Stephen Crane.

About this edition

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0393964302
• ISBN 13: 9780393964301
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352
• Editor: Pizer Donald