Anonymity And Death: The Fiction Of B. Traven
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
Few literary enigmas rival the enduring mystery of B. Traven — the reclusive, pseudonymous author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre — whose true identity was never conclusively established during his lifetime, making his very existence as inseparable from his fiction as the themes of alienation and mortality that saturate his work. In Anonymity and Death: the Fiction of B. Traven, Donald O. Chankin presents a rigorous critical examination of Traven's body of work, arguing that the author's deliberate self-erasure is not merely biographical curiosity but a profound artistic strategy that shapes every layer of his narratives, from the rootless protagonists of his adventure tales to the crushing social critiques embedded in his Mexican jungle novels. Chankin's analysis situates Traven within the broader currents of 20th-century modernist literature, illuminating how themes of identity, class struggle, and the spectre of death function as the structural and philosophical backbone of an oeuvre that has long deserved more sustained academic attention. Written with the measured authority of scholarly criticism and published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, this study uncovers the ideological tensions between anonymity as liberation and anonymity as annihilation — a paradox that leaves the reader questioning not just who B. Traven was, but whether the man and the myth were ever truly separable.
Author: Donald O. Chankin
Format: Hardback
Published: 1975, The Pennsylvania State University Press
Genre: Literary theory
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
Few literary enigmas rival the enduring mystery of B. Traven — the reclusive, pseudonymous author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre — whose true identity was never conclusively established during his lifetime, making his very existence as inseparable from his fiction as the themes of alienation and mortality that saturate his work. In Anonymity and Death: the Fiction of B. Traven, Donald O. Chankin presents a rigorous critical examination of Traven's body of work, arguing that the author's deliberate self-erasure is not merely biographical curiosity but a profound artistic strategy that shapes every layer of his narratives, from the rootless protagonists of his adventure tales to the crushing social critiques embedded in his Mexican jungle novels. Chankin's analysis situates Traven within the broader currents of 20th-century modernist literature, illuminating how themes of identity, class struggle, and the spectre of death function as the structural and philosophical backbone of an oeuvre that has long deserved more sustained academic attention. Written with the measured authority of scholarly criticism and published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, this study uncovers the ideological tensions between anonymity as liberation and anonymity as annihilation — a paradox that leaves the reader questioning not just who B. Traven was, but whether the man and the myth were ever truly separable.