States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel. By ELIZABETH BARNES. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 152 pp. In a book of considerable relevance to students of the early American novel, Elizabeth Barnes from the College of William and...

Photography first makes its appearance in Joyce Carol Oates's novels in Childwold when 14-year-old Laney is taken to an art exhibit, a place she has never been before. While studying a wall of portrait photographs of working class people, she is moved to...

Yesterday's treasury select committee hearing in parliament showed the potential downside of bringing democracy to the people.Instead of the usual robust interrogation of policymakers, we were treated to a lame succession of questions from the general public which the experienced men – Bank of England...

A Syrian court sentenced four pro-democracy campaigners, including one of Syria's most respected writers, to prison terms Sunday as part of President's Bashar Assad's latest crack down on dissent."We are not criminals, we are patriotic people," said writer Michel Kilo from behind bars after Judge...

"Democracy," a novel, takes its title from Henry Adams's "Democracy," subtitled "An American Novel."… I have found it hard to make out what connection there can be between Joan Didion's "Democracy," opening with a memory of the pink dawns of early atomic weapons tests in the Pacific, and Henry Adams's "Democracy," which deals with the dirty politics of the second Grant Administration. And, leaving aside Henry A...

The steady drizzle of bitter memories in [Democracy] keeps directing the reader to "one night outside Honolulu in the spring of 1975 … when the C130s and the C141s were already shuttling between Honolulu and Anderson and Clark and Saigon … bringing out the dependents, bringing out the dealers, bringing out the money, bringing out the pet dogs and the sponsored bar girls and the porcelain elephants…." From this string of scornful images we can tell that the American system ...

I do not have the attention span to sustain a lengthy depression, but I have of late been reading two novelists who do: Renata Adler and Joan Didion. I think of them as the Sunshine Girls, largely because in their work the sun is never shining…. Miss Adler and Miss Didion are slender women who write slender books heavy with gloom. (p. 62) Democracy, Joan Didion's most recent novel, is, as its narrator, a woman calling herself Joan Didion, calls it, a "novel of fitful glimpses." I...