James A. Kaser is professor and archivist at the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York. He is the author of The Washington, D.C. of Fiction: A Research Guide (Scarecrow, 2006).
Kaser (College of Staten Island, CUNY; The Washington, D.C. of
Fiction: A Research Guide, 2006), a specialist in American cultural
studies, has done a masterful job of locating and arranging
fictional works primarily set in Chicago. Kaser states that his
task was made more difficult because catalogers did not ordinarily
provide subject designations in this genre before 1980. Cataloging
rules changed by 2000 to allow geographic and subject designators
for fiction, permitting greater ease in finding such works through
keyword-searchable Web-based tools. The bulk of this book consists
of an annotated bibliography of novels and collections of short
stories (but not dramatic works) published between 1852 and 1980.
To offer a more comprehensive source book, Kaser supplements these
one-paragraph entries with a designated appendix A, a register of
unannotated works whose first editions appeared between 1980 and
2008. Appendix B groups citations for pre-1980 fiction
chronologically; readers can use these to find the explanatory
notes for works in similar time periods in the alphabetically
arranged major portion of the anthology. A general subject index
and list of brief biographies, with each entry's own sources, of
all the writers on whom some information is available, makes this
work easy to read and a pleasure to peruse. The Chicago of Fiction
is a boon for writers on the Windy City seeking textual information
to portray a mood in their own fictional works; and for the many
mavens of Chicago culture, who will appreciate discovering quirky,
little-known fictional accounts inspired by a city of significance
with often symbolic connotations. Recommended. Lower-level
undergraduates and above; general readers.
*CHOICE*
A valuable resource, and a particularly rich one for scholars of
American naturalism, given the sheer number of works indexed from
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
*Studies in American Naturalism*
The 2,223 total entries vary on how much they focus on Chicago, but
the extensive index greatly enables researchers by listing entries
by number code under various subjects ranging from Abortion and
Academics to Youth Culture and Xenophobia. In addition there are
chronological lists by decades from the 1830 to the 1970s. This
makes the source useful not only for those interested in Chicago
primarily, but also in broader topics where the city plays only a
partial role.
*American Reference Books Annual*
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