Infinite Patience

For Argument’s Sake: Essays on Literature and Culture is a collected volume of forty-five pieces I wrote on a range of books, films, and cultural events between 2009 and 2013. The collection includes everything from reviews to blog posts, from short essays to peer-reviewed articles. As I write in the author’s note at the start of the book, I brought them all together and republished them with the intention of “retrieving them from the black hole of the archive,” to make them more easily available to readers who might find them useful.

You can purchase a print copy of For Argument’s Sake by clicking the link above or the cover image. In the spirit of furthering the intentions behind the book, however, I have also made its entire contents available for free in PDF format. Below is a list of almost everything that appears in the book, minus the author’s note and the acknowledgements. Just click on any of the titles to access an exact reproduction of a given chapter. If you have questions or comments, feel free to email me at danieldaviswood [at] gmail [dot] com.

For Argument’s Sake: Table of Contents

• The Disappearance of the Man Who Never Was
  On Washington Irving’s creation of Diedrich Knickerbocker

• A Stain on the American Soul
  On the antebellum politics of Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”

• Character Synthesis in Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
  On the implications of the first-person-plural

• Distinct Dehumanisations
  On the sanitised revisions of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

• A Return to Blood-Soaked and Well-Trodden Ground
  On Nathaniel Philbrick’s study of the Battle of Little Bighorn

• Picking Away at Pop Fascism
  On superheroes and the American Monomyth

• The Times They Are A-Changin’
  On Zack Snyder’s film adaptation of Watchmen

• Fitting the Form
  On Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun

• Dignity Through Degradation
  On Dave Eggers’ What Is the What and Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place

• Green Hair and Nose Bones
  On Philipp Meyer’s American Rust and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men

• What Need?
  On the supposed “need” for fictional storytelling

• Under the Sway of the Cinematic Imagination
  On the postmodern American novel and contemporary social realism

• At a Loss for Words
  On Eudora Welty’s “Where Is the Voice Coming From?”

• The Other Seven-Eighths of the Iceberg
  On Ernest Hemingway’s six-word story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

• Speaking Around the Unspeakable
  On Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms

• The Old Man and the Sea and Someone Else
  On Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea

• Papa as a Young Man
  On Ernest Hemingway’s Letters: Volume 1, 1907-1922

• Bewildered
  On Dylan Nice’s Other Kinds

• Beyond City Limits
  On Edward P. Jones’ juvenilia: three uncollected short stories

• Faulkner’s Structural Imagery
  On William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying

• Bellow’s ‘Adventures’
  On Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March

• Speech and Stoner
  On John Williams’ Stoner

• Clark’s Quiet Masterpiece
  On Walter van Tilburg Clark’s The Ox-Bow Incident

• Howling Into the Silence, Yearning for a Reply
  On Carson McCullers’ “Correspondence”

• The Literature of Monstrosity, the Monstrosity of Literature
  On Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita

• Notes on Narrative Voice
  On Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

• Blood Meridian and Its Environmental Consciousness
  On Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

• A Novelist Dabbles in Dramatic Form
  On Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Form

• Doctorow by Half
  On E.L. Doctorow’s All the Time in the World: New and Selected Short Stories

• Rebirth of the Nouveau Roman
  On attitudes towards realism and experimentalism in post-9/11 literature

• The Shock of the New
  On Tom McCarthy’s C

• Alive on the Page
  On the novels, short stories, essays, and legacy of David Foster Wallace

• The Quiet Achiever of Irish Literature
  On Claire Keegan’s Foster

• A Questionable Haziness
  On Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights

• Frankenstein and Formal Bias
  On Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Danny Boyle’s theatrical adaptation

• Into Oblivion and Out Again
  On the legacy, memorialisation, and cultural recovery of Patrick White

• A Bitter Heritage
  On Randolph Stow’s Tourmaline and Tim Winton’s The Turning

• A Tale of Two Cities
  On the literary cultures of Edinburgh and Melbourne

• A Tale of Two Cities: Postscript
  On the effects of Melbourne’s UNESCO City of Literature status

• Cultural Cringe
  On Christos Tsiolkas and social realism

• A Gaze into the Abyss
  On Australia’s emerging writers

• Editor? Editor?
  On the culture of book reviewing in Australia

• Muddy Language
  On Michael Sala’s The Last Thread

• The Audacity of Veracity
  On Lisa Lang’s Utopian Man and E.W. Cole: Chasing the Rainbow

• The Literature of Cities
  On Delia Falconer’s Sydney and Sophie Cunningham’s Melbourne