The Genius

by Theodore Dreiser

Overview

This story has its beginnings in the town of Alexandria, Illinois, between 1884 and 1889, at the time when the place had a population of somewhere near ten thousand. There was about it just enough of the air of a city to relieve it of the sense of rural life. It had one street-car line, a theatre, -or rather, an opera house, so-called (why no one might say, for no opera was ever performed there)-two railroads, with their stations, and a business district, composed of four brisk sides to a public square

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783752323504
Publisher:	Bod Third Party Titles
Publication date:	07/21/2020
Pages:	700
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 1.54(d)

About the Author

Clare Virginia Eby is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of Dreiser and Veblen,Saboteurs of the Status Quo, coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser, and editor of the Norton Critical edition of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

Editorial Reviews

"This edition provides an opportunity to follow in close compass Dreiser's process of revision. It captures his point of view at a transitional moment in his career, and it sheds light on his subsequent work."—Times Literary Supplement

"This edition provides an opportunity to follow in close compass Dreiser's process of revision. It captures his point of view at a transitional moment in his career, and it sheds light on his subsequent work."—Times Literary Supplement

"This is a superb edition: skillfully edited, fully annotated, usefully contextualized. We have been given a new and almost entirely unknown version of The Genius—the text as originally conceived by Dreiser. It now demands our attention and close study."—James L. W. West III, general editor of the Cambridge Fitzgerald Edition

"The Genius is one of the most overlooked and underrated of Dreiser's novels, yet it is arguably the key book for students of the writer, offering abundant materials for an understanding of the tensions between art and business and between romance and realism. It is also one of the finest portraits of marriage—and of the passions of marital frustration—in all of literature, as well as an exploration of the supposed sexual privileges of genius. Clare Eby's presentation of this earlier and previously unpublished Genius is a triumph of textual and interpretive scholarship, offering in its accompanying essays and apparatus a meticulous consideration of the similarities and differences between the two texts as well as copious explanatory notes. A great addition to Dreiser scholarship, this original version reminds us again of the fascinating evolution of Dreiser's powerful imagination."—Miles Orvell, author of The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940

"A first-rate piece of textual scholarship that provides a vital and valuable new perspective on an important novel."—Leonard Cassuto, Fordham University

From the Publisher