Paradigms of Authority in the Carver Canon

Description

Raymond Carver's personal story as a writer became publicly known through an unusually intense co-operation with his literary agent Gordon Lish. Carver’s career can be viewed as the story of a fight for the control of his writerly voice in which he is doomed to fail due to the heterogeneity characterizing the genesis of his works. The parallel versions of the same stories in the Carver canon not only pose a threat to any attempt of a simplistic evaluation of his literary legacy but also raise questions about the authority of the writer. The author of the present book considers the choices Carver, Lish and other editors made part of the collective social act of manufacturing and attempts to carry out a neutral analysis of the various versions. (Source: Google Books API)