Título: A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses
Autor: Anne Trubek
Sinopse: There are many ways to show our devotion to an author besides reading his or her works. Graves make for popular pilgrimage sites, but far more popular are writers' house museums. What is it we hope to accomplish by trekking to the home of a dead author? We may go in search of the point of inspiration, eager to stand on the very spot where our favorite literary characters first came to life—and find ourselves instead in the house where the author himself was conceived, or where she drew her last breath. Perhaps it is a place through which our writer passed only briefly, or maybe it really was a longtime home—now thoroughly remade as a decorator's show-house. In A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses Anne Trubek takes a vexed, often funny, and always thoughtful tour of a goodly number of house museums across the nation. In Key West she visits the shamelessly ersatz shrine to a hard-living Ernest Hemingway, while meditating on his lost Cuban farm and the sterile Idaho house in which he committed suicide. In Hannibal, Missouri, she walks the fuzzy line between fact and fiction, as she visits the home of the young Samuel Clemens—and the purported haunts of Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Injun' Joe. She hits literary pay-dirt in Concord, Massachusetts, the nineteenth-century mecca that gave home to Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau—and yet could not accommodate a surprisingly complex Louisa May Alcott. She takes us along the trail of residences that Edgar Allan Poe left behind in the wake of his many failures and to the burned-out shell of a California house with which Jack London staked his claim on posterity. In Dayton, Ohio, a charismatic guide brings Paul Laurence Dunbar to compelling life for those few visitors willing to listen; in Cleveland, Trubek finds a moving remembrance of Charles Chesnutt in a house that no longer stands. Why is it that we visit writers' houses? Although admittedly skeptical about the stories these buildings tell us about their former inhabitants, Anne Trubek carries us along as she falls at least a little bit in love with each stop on her itinerary and finds in each some truth about literature, history, and contemporary America.
Contexto da obra
Quando a classificação é mais ampla, o contexto do livro costuma depender ainda mais de autoria, tema e edição. “A Skeptic’s Guide to Writers’ Houses”, de Anne Trubek, publicado pela editora University of Pennsylvania Press, em 2010 e com 176 páginas, integra a categoria Livros Variados. Por isso, autoria, edição e tema acabam tendo ainda mais peso na forma de apresentar o livro.
Editora: University of Pennsylvania Press
Páginas: 176
Ano: 2010
Edição: Illustrated
Linguagem: pt_BR
ISBN: 9780812242928
ISBN13: 9780812242928
Sobre a editora
Os livros da editora University of Pennsylvania Press costumam oferecer uma imersão densa em contextos históricos e culturais, com foco em análises detalhadas que conectam ideias a realidades sociais e políticas. A leitura dessas obras traz à tona temas como conflitos medievais, transformações sociais, e a interseção entre gênero, raça e poder, sempre com um tom que equilibra rigor acadêmico e acessibilidade. O catálogo privilegia narrativas que exploram tanto eventos históricos específicos quanto reflexões sobre construções sociais e culturais, muitas vezes em períodos que vão da Antiguidade à era moderna inicial. A linguagem tende a ser precisa e o ritmo, mais contemplativo, convidando o leitor a um entendimento aprofundado, sem abrir mão da clareza.
