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Too Much Flesh and Jabez - (American Literature) by Coleman Dowell (Paperback)
About this item
Highlights
- Coleman Dowell's "Southern Gothic" is a novel about sexual repression.
- Author(s): Coleman Dowell
- 151 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, LGBT
- Series Name: American Literature
Description
Book Synopsis
Coleman Dowell's "Southern Gothic" is a novel about sexual repression. Miss Ethel, a spinster school teacher, decides to write what she calls a "perverse tale" about one of her former students, a Kentucky farmer named Jim Cummins. Endowing him with unnaturally large genitals, she spins a tawdry tale of his frustrated relationship with his petite wife. Expressing all the bitterness of "an old woman's revenge," Miss Ethel's tale is nonetheless a sensitive depiction of rural life in the early years of World War II.
Dowell's masterful use of the tale-within-a-tale to explore psychological states makes "Too Much Flesh and Jabez" a memorable achievement.
Review Quotes
Dowell writes with a superb power of constant implicationalways careful, always energetic, always suggestive.--Thom Gunn, "Times Literary Supplement"
This novel is a meticulously and subtly composed tour de force on the imagination.--Gilbert Sorrentino, "New York Times Book Review"