giahomof

The Homeless of "Ironweed"

Blossoms on the Crag


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1997
178 pages
Cloth: 
$31.00
0-87745-559-7
978-0-87745-559-2

“An excellent book…Giamo reads Ironweed in a richly nuanced context of major ideas about human nature and experience without recourse to the narrow and wholly professionalized discourses of contemporary academic criticism. His reading is above all an exercise in humanistic criticism.”—Donald Pizer, Tulane University

The Homeless of Ironweed is both a meditation on William Kennedy's remarkable, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and a literary and cultural analysis. Throughout Giamo remains grounded in a close reading of the novel which explores the social conditions, cultural meanings, and literary representations of classic and contemporary homelessness in America and abroad. Divided into chapters built around the play of central motifs in Ironweed, Giamo's study is wry and learned; his prose style, with its alternating lyrical and expositional modes, reflects the richly varied form and style of the novel itself.

Table of contents: 

Contents

Author’s Note

Introduction

One: Snows of Reduction

Two: Memory…as Vivid as Eyesight

Three: The Fugitive Dance

Four: A Creature Worthy of Scrutiny

Five: Apparencies and Antinomies

Six: The Helen Blossom

Afterword: Cycle and Form

Notes

Bibliography