Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)

A book of wicked wit, Miss Lonelyhearts is the saga of a young (male) newspaper advice columnist who grows despondent reading the piles of letters from the broken and the confused. Miss Lonelyhearts takes to sickness for relief until his gruff editor, Shrike, tells him to get over it and turn to Christ, "the Miss Lonelyhearts of Miss Lonelyhearts." This advice propels Miss Lonelyhearts into a period of soul-searching that sends him to both the church and the bottle. He stumbles through a series of misadventures, cascading the novel humorously and tragically along to a surprising end. Contents......Page 6 Editor’s Note......Page 8 Introduction......Page 10 The Religious Masquerade: Miss Lonelyhearts......Page 20 Letters and Spirit in Miss Lonelyhearts......Page 42 The Ritual Icon......Page 58 Miss Lonelyhearts: The Absurd Center of the Dead World......Page 62 “Inarticulate Expressions of Genuine Suffering?”: A Reply to the Correspondence in Miss Lonelyhearts......Page 92 Miss Lonelyhearts and the Rhetoric of Disintegration......Page 108 Shrike as the Modernist Anti-Hero in Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts......Page 122 Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts: The Waste Land Rescripted......Page 132 Saints and Lovers: Miss Lonelyhearts in the Tradition......Page 144 The Desert, the Lamb, the Cross: Debased Iconography in Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts......Page 156 Chronology......Page 170 Contributors......Page 172 Bibliography......Page 174 Acknowledgments......Page 178 Index......Page 180 The religious masquerade : Miss Lonelyhearts / Kingsley Widmer Letters and spirit in Miss Lonelyhearts / Mark Conroy The ritual icon / Douglas Robinson Miss Lonelyhearts : the absurd center of the dead world / Robert Emmet Long "Inarticulate expressions of genuine suffering?" : a reply to the correspondence in Miss Lonelyhearts / John Keyes Miss Lonelyhearts and the rhetoric of disintegration / Robert Wexelblatt Shrike as the modernist anti-hero in Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts / Beverly J. Jones Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts : the Waste Land rescripted / Miriam Fuchs Saints and lovers : Miss Lonelyhearts in the tradition / Richard P. Lynch The desert, the lamb, the cross : debased iconography in Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts / Marian E. Crowe. While a very short novel might be easy to overlook, Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) has been compared to The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby. One of the few titles written by West, who died in a car crash at age 37, Miss Lonelyhearts was published when he was only 30 and is seen as his masterpiece. In its pages, a newspaper's money-making venture-the addition of an advice column-pulls us into a world of nihilistic despair, as we follow the life of the man appointed to reply to the seemingly hopeless letters of a lost and ill-educated public still grappling for answers. Series presents critical essays reflecting a variety of important 20th-century criticism on major works. Each volume also contains an essay by Harold Bloom, critical biographies, notes on contributing critics. Nathanael West's story of an advice columnist sits alongside the great works of Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner. Ages 16+. Contains ten essays in which critics analyze various aspects of Nathanael West's "Miss Lonelyhearts," a drama in which a young advice columnist becomes tragically involved in the lives of his correspondents, and includes an introduction, bibliography, chronology of the author's life and work, and notes on the contributors A critical review of the work features the contributions of Kingsley Widmer, Mark Conroy, Beverly J. Jones, Miriam Fuchs, and other scholars, discussing the themes and characters of the novel. A collection of essays on Nathanael West's novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, arranged in chronological order of publication