Research Catalog

Title

Willie Masters' lonesome wife / by William H. Gass.

Author

Gass, William H., 1924-2017

Publication

[Elmwood Park, IL] : Dalkey Archive Press, 1989.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Additional Authors

• Levy, Lawrence
• Rudman, Burton L.

Description

[61] p. : ill.; 26 cm.

Summary

Disappointed by her inattentive husband/reader, Babs engages in an exuberant display of the physical charms of language to entice an illicit new lover: a man named Gelvin in one sense, but more importantly, the reader of this "essay-novella" which, in the years since its first appearance in 1968 as a supplement to TriQuarterly, has attained the status of a postmodernist classic. Like Laurence Sterne and Lewis Carroll before him, Gass uses a variety of visual devices: photographs, comic-strip balloons, different typefaces, parallel story lines (sometimes three or four to the page), even coffee stains. As Larry McCaffery has pointed out, "the lonesome lady of the book's title, who is gradually revealed to be lady language herself, creates an elaborate series of devices which she hopes will draw attention to her slighted charms [and] force the reader to confront what she literally is: a physically exciting literary text."

Subject

Erotic stories

Genre/Form

• Novellas
• Essays
• Illustrated works

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

ISBN

0916583465 :

LCCN

^^^89011724^

OCLC

• 19739341
• SCSB-10957312

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library