A Guide to English: Periods and Movements in American Literature

"America is a nation making itself up as it goes along--a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history. In more than two hundred original essays, this book brings together the nation's many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what "Made in America" means. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoric--cultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape." - from the publisher

"For the sixth edition, James D. Hart and Phillip Leininger have updated the Companion in light of what has happened in American literature since 1982. To this end, they have revised the entries on such established authors as Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and Joyce Carol Oates, and they have added more than 180 new entries on novelists (T. Coraghessan Boyle, Tim O'Brien, Louise Erdrich, Don De Lillo), poets (Rita Dove, Weldon Kees), playwrights (Wendy Wasserstein, August Wilson), popular writers (Stephen King, Louis L'Amour), historians (James M. McPherson, David Herbert Donald, William Manchester), naturalists (Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey), and literary critics (Camille Paglia, Richard Ellmann). In addition, the Companion boasts more women's, African-American, and ethnic voices, with new entries on such luminaries as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, M.F.K. Fisher, William Least Heat-Moon, Ursula Le Guin, and Oscar Hijuelos, among many others. With over 5,000 total entries, The Oxford Companion to American Literature reflects a dynamic balance between past and contemporary literature, surveying virtually every aspect of our national literature, from the Pulitzer Prize to pulp fiction, and from Walt Whitman to William F. Buckley, Jr. There are over 2,000 biographical profiles of important American authors (with information regarding their styles, subjects, and major works) and influential foreign writers as well as other figures who have been important in the nation's social and cultural history. There are more than 1,100 full summaries of important American novels, stories, essays, poems (with verse form noted), plays, biographies and autobiographies, tracts, narratives, and histories. The new edition provides historical background and astute commentary on literary schools and movements, literary awards, magazines, newspapers, and a wide variety of other matters directly related to writing in America. Finally, the book is thoroughly cross-referenced and features an extensive and fully updated index of literary and social history." - from the publisher

"This comprehensive volume extensively treats Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, Hemingway and other long-cherished writers, while also giving considerable attention to more recent authors such as Kate Chopin and to forms of writing not studied amply in the past. Contributions by foremost scholars and critics reexamine in contemporary terms traditional subjects such as the importance of Puritanism, romanticism, and frontier humor in American life and writing. Some of the newer topics covered are the role of women as writers, readers, and literary subjects and the impact of writers from minority groups. The book sets forth a generation's interpretation of the rise of American civilization and culture." - from the publisher

"This collection of critical and biographical articles covers hundreds of notable authors from the 17th century to the present day. Signed essays, 12-15 pages in length by noted scholars, provide thought-provoking insights into the lives, careers and works of American writers. Each Supplement covers approximately 20 additional authors." - from the publisher

"The Cambridge History of American Literature addresses the broad spectrum of new and established directions in all branches of American writing, and will include the work of scholars and critics who have shaped, and who continue to shape, what has become a major area of literary scholarship. These authors, who speak for the continuities as well as the disruptions sustained between generations of scholarship, represent the achievements of the last half-century in Americanist literary criticism. Generously proportioned narratives allow at once for a broader vision and more magisterial sweep of American literary history than has been possible previously; and while the voice of traditional criticism is implicit in these narratives, it joins forces with the diversity of interests that characterise contemporary literary studies." - from the publisher

"This new history of American literature from pre-Columbian times to the present is written in an informed and accessible style by one of the leading authorities in the field. While paying attention to the full range of fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction that has been incorporated into the mainstream literary canon, it also looks at other forms, including oral literature, folktales, spirituals, the blues, the western, the defective story, the thriller and science fiction. All this writing is placed in the context of American social and cultural history both before and after the formation of the United States." "Taking account of the radical changes that have occurred in our understanding of American literature over the past 30 years, this book concentrates above all on the plural character of culture in the United States, the conflicting forces at work in its history, and the continuing acts of imagination that constitute the making of this nation." - from the publisher

"Indian (Native American) myths and legends of creation, sun, moon, stars, heroes, monsters, warriors, love, lust, Coyote the trickster, animals, ghosts, and the end of the world.More than 160 tales from eighty tribal groups gives us a rich and lively panorama of the Native American mythic heritage. From across the continent comes tales of creation and love; heroes and war; animals, tricksters, and the end of the world. In addition to mining the best folkloric sources of the nineteenth century, the editors have also included a broad selection of contemporary Native American voices." - from the publisher

"One hundred illustrated stories on Indian tricksters. The characters include Coyote, a master thief and insatiable lover; Iktomi, a shapeshifting Lakota spiderman; and Veeho, the Cheyenne daredevil. Spanning several centuries and the whole North American continent, a unique, illustrated collection of more than one hundred Native American folktales featuring the tricksters of sixty tribes is a companion volume to American Indian Myths and Legends." - from the publisher

"Storytelling and singing continue to be a vital part of community life for Native peoples today. Voices from Four Directions gathers stories and songs from thirty-one Native groups in North America -- including the Inupiaqs in the frigid North, the Lushootseeds along the forested coastline of the far West, the Catawbas in the humid South, and the Maliseets of the rugged woods of the East. Vivid stories of cosmological origins and transformation, historical events remembered and retold, as well as legendary fables can be found in these pages. Well-known Trickster figures like Raven, Rabbit, and Coyote figure prominently in several tales as do heroes of local fame such as Tom Laporte of the Maliseets. The stories and songs entertain, instruct, and recall rich legacies as well as obligations. Many are retellings and reinventions of classic narratives, while others are more recent creations. Award-winning poet and critic Brian Swann has gathered some of the richest and most diverse literatures of Native North America and provides an introduction to the volume. In addition, each story is introduced and newly translated." - from the publisher

"In the beginning, North America was Indian country. But only in the beginning. After the opening act of the great national drama, Native Americans yielded to the westward rush of European settlers." "Or so the story usually goes. Yet, for three centuries after Columbus, Native people controlled most of eastern North America and profoundly shaped its destiny. In Facing East from Indian Country, Daniel K. Richter keeps Native people center-stage throughout the story of the origins of the United States." "Viewed from Indian country, the sixteenth century was an era in which Native people discovered Europeans and struggled to make sense of a new world. Well into the seventeenth century, the most profound challenges to Indian life came less from the arrival of a relative handful of European colonists than from the biological, economic, and environmental forces the newcomers unleashed. Drawing upon their own traditions, Indian communities reinvented themselves and carved out a place in a world dominated by transatlantic European empires. In 1776, however, when some of Britain's colonists rebelled against that imperial world, they overturned the system that had made Euro-American and Native coexistence possible. Eastern North America ceased to be Indian country only because the revolutionaries denied the continent's first peoples a place in the nation they were creating." "In rediscovering early America as Indian country, Richter employs the historian's craft to challenge cherished assumptions about times and places we thought we knew well, revealing Native American experiences at the core of the nation's birth and identity." - from the publisher

"In many accounts of Native American history, treaties are synonymous with tragedy. From the beginnings of settlement, Europeans made and broke treaties, often exploiting Native American lack of alphabetic literacy to manipulate political negotiation. But while colonial dealings had devastating results for Native people, treaty making and breaking involved struggles more complex than any simple contest between invaders and victims. The early colonists were often compelled to negotiate on Indian terms, and treaties took a bewildering array of shapes ranging from rituals to gestures to pictographs. At the same time, Jeffrey Glover demonstrates, treaties were international events, scrutinized by faraway European audiences and framed against a background of English, Spanish, French, and Dutch imperial rivalries. To establish the meaning of their agreements, colonists and Natives adapted and invented many new kinds of political representation, combining rituals from tribal, national, and religious traditions. Drawing on an archive that includes written documents, printed books, orations, landscape markings, wampum beads, tally sticks, and other technologies of political accounting, Glover examines the powerful influence of treaty making along the vibrant and multicultural Atlantic coast of the seventeenth century." - from the publisher

"The Native peoples of colonial New England were quick to grasp the practical functions of Western literacy. Their written literary output was composed to suit their own needs and expressed views often in resistance to the agendas of the European colonists they were confronted with. Red Ink is an engaging retelling of American colonial history, one that draws on documents that have received scant critical and scholarly attention to offer an important new interpretation grounded in indigenous contexts and perspectives. Author Drew Lopenzina reexamines a literature that has been compulsively "corrected" and overinscribed with the norms and expectations of the dominant culture, while simultaneously invoking the often violent tensions of "contact" and the processes of unwitnessing by which Native histories and accomplishments were effectively erased from the colonial record. In a compelling narrative arc, Lopenzina enables the reader to travel through a history that, however familiar, has never been fully appreciated or understood from a Native-centered perspective." - from the publisher

"Algonquin and Iroquois natives of the American Northeast were described in great detail by colonial explorers who ventured into the region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Beginning with the writings of John Smith and Samuel de Champlain, Gordon Sayre analyzes French and English accounts of Native Americans to reveal the rhetorical codes by which their cultures were represented and the influence that these images of Indians had on colonial and modern American society. By emphasizing the work of Pierre Francois-Xavier Charlevoix, Joseph-Francois Lafitau, and Baron de Lahontan, among others, Sayre highlights the important contribution that French explorers and ethnographers made to colonial literature." - from the publisher

"Embedded in the rhetoric of some of the key writings on early America Regis finds the concepts and presuppositions of natural history. Describing Early America examines Bartram's Travels, Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, and Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer - texts that previously have been viewed as belles lettres - and shows how these writings employ recognized scientific methods in recording observations of the new world. Focusing on the descriptions of plant, animal, and human life in the new territories, Regis reestablishes the scientific framework of these texts and offers a reading "based on the lost paradigm of the science of natural history."" "According to Regis, writers observing the new world extended the Linnaean system developed for classifying plants to their descriptive narratives of the land, its animals, and its inhabitants, including the native populations and blacks. These descriptions, Regis argues, ultimately legitimized in scientific terms a view of the natural order of the world, expressed in the idea of the Great Chain of Being, which in a hierarchy places "savages" below "Homo sapiens europaeus." Such historyless and faceless descriptions resulted in a portrayal of America as a static, timeless tableau awaiting occupation." "Regis considers natural history in its original context, examines the rhetoric of natural history writing - its organization, sentences, and diction - and links the genre to early descriptive narrative through an analysis of Travels, Notes, and Letters. In her persuasive rediscovery of an intellectual tradition, she offers a fresh view of the way in which such texts were conceived and drafted and how they contributed to the self-definition of America." - from the publisher

"For generations, scholars have imagined American puritans as religious enthusiasts, fleeing persecution, finding refuge in Massachusetts, and founding "America." The puritans have been read as a product of New England and the origin of American exceptionalism. This History challenges the usual understanding of American puritans, offering new ways of reading their history and their literary culture. Together, an international team of authors make clear that puritan America cannot be thought of apart from Native America, and that its literature is also grounded in Britain, Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and networks that spanned the globe. Each chapter focuses on a single place, method, idea, or context to read familiar texts anew and to introduce forgotten or neglected voices and writings. A History of American Puritan Literature is a collaborative effort to create not a singular literary history, but a series of interlocked new histories of American puritan literature." - from the publisher

"The first comprehensive and integrate critical survey of colonial American poetry, this book focuses on the New England Puritans, who produced the most notable poets, relating them contextually to writers of the Middle Atlantic and Southern colonies and to their European forebears.Following a general introduction by the editor, the book's three parts present: first, the social and aesthetic context in which the poets worked; second, the individual achievements of nine of the most successful poets; thin the varied forms the poets used sacred and profane, serious and humorous, formal and informal." - from the publisher

"Tracing New England's literary emergence through the early national and antebellum periods, author Lawrence Buell combines intensive study of texts by such major figures as Emerson, Hawthorne, and Dickinson with analyses of works by a great range of other New England writers. The result is a new and deeper look at the rise of American literary professionalism, the meaning and significance of Neoclassicism and Romanticism in America, and the conventions and ideology of some of the period's most distinctive genres." - from the publisher

"Standing outside elite or even middling circles, outsiders who were marginalized by limitations on their freedom and their need to labor for a living had a unique grasp on the profoundly social nature of print and its power to influence public opinion. In Empowering Words, Karen A. Weyler explores how outsiders used ephemeral formats such as broadsides, pamphlets, and newspapers to publish poetry, captivity narratives, formal addresses, and other genres with wide appeal in early America. To gain access to print, outsiders collaborated with amanuenses and editors, inserted their stories into popular genres and cheap media, tapped into existing social and religious networks, and sought sponsors and patrons. They wrote individually, collaboratively, and even corporately, but writing for them was almost always an act of connection. Disparate levels of literacy did not necessarily entail subordination on the part of the less-literate collaborator. Even the minimally literate and the illiterate understood the potential for print to be life changing, and outsiders shrewdly employed strategies to assert themselves within collaborative dynamics. Empowering Words covers an array of outsiders including artisans; the minimally literate; the poor, indentured, or enslaved; and racial minorities. By focusing not only on New England, the traditional stronghold of early American literacy, but also on southern towns such as Williamsburg and Charleston, Weyler limns a more expansive map of early American authorship." - from the publisher

"Transcendentalism, a movement of theological innovation and literary experimentation arising within New England Unitarianism in the 1830s and 1840s, significantly influenced American religion, literature, education, and political culture. This reference is the first comprehensive guide to the major philosophical concepts, themes, genres, periodicals, events, organizations and movements, and places associated with Transcendentalism in the United States. Significant classical, European, Asian, and native sources and influences are included, as are later transformations. This reference approaches the subject from a history-of-ideas perspective, embracing the inconsistencies and oddities as well as the powerful achievements of the Transcendentalists. With 145 entries by 70 expert contributors, this volume is the first comprehensive guide to the major philosophical concepts, themes, genres, periodicals, events, organizations and movements, and places associated with Transcendentalism in the United States. Significant classical, European, Asian, and native sources and influences are included, as are later manifestations and transformations. Aspects of the movement covered include religion, philosophy, literature, the arts, education, politics, science, and reform. The book features separate entry bibliographies, an extensive chronology, and a detailed index." - from the publisher

"This text has taken its place as the definitive treatment of the most distinguished age of American literature. Centering the discussion around five literary giants of the mid-nineteenth century-Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman. Matthiessen elucidates their conceptions of the nature and function of literature, and the extent to which these were realized in their writings." - from the publisher

"Broader in scope than any previous literary study of the transcendentalists, this rewarding book analyzes the theories and forms characteristic of a vital group of American writers, as well as the principles and vision underlying transcendentalism. All the movement's major literary figures and forms are considered in detail. Lawrence Buell combines intellectual history and critical explication, giving equal attention to general trends and to particular works and individuals. His chapters on conversation, religious discourse, catalog rhetoric, and literary travelogue treat intensively topics that have been relatively neglected. His analyses of Ellery Channing's poetry and the use of persona in Emerson and Very are also innovative. In the final section, he offers the first systematic account of the autobiographical tradition in transcendentalist writing.This incisive and sympathetic overview of transcendentalist writing and thought will attract readers interested in American culture, and it will suggest new critical approaches to nonfiction." - from the publisher

"American literature in its founding moment is made up of books that everyone wanted to see written but which nobody wants to read. All it can ever hope to achieve is to prove its glowing prospectus a lie. American literature from Brockden Brown, Cooper and Poe, and passing by way ofTranscendentalism to Hawthorne, Melville and Twain, is a mode of writing ever subject to anxiety, apprehension and strain. In seeking to give the shadow substance it remains haunted by the fear that it may never be other than a literature of shadows, speaking, like William Wilson's double, in an imperious but throaty whisper. It is crippled by uncertainty as to what audience it is addressing and yet desperately wants to be heard. It seeks to mobilise and mesmerise a vast audience by its commanding rhetoric yet fears that that same power may be employed only to stifle the oppressive sense of empty rows and to hold off the unobtrusive departure of the few that remain. Above all, it would like to be taken seriously. Yet, however hard American writers may try, they never get the reassurance they need. They bear within them the curse of the excessive- which is always and at once to go too far and never to go far enough." - from the introduction

"The late Perry Miller once stated, “I have been compelled to insist that the mind of man is the basic factor in human history,” and his study of the mind in America has shaped the thought of three decades of scholars. The fifteen essays here collected―several of them previously unpublished―address themselves to the facets of the American consciousness and to their expression in literature from the time of the Cambridge Agreement to the Nobel Prize acceptance speeches of Hemingway and Faulkner. A companion volume to Errand into the Wilderness, its general theme is one adumbrated in Miller’s two-volume masterpiece, The New England Mind―the thrust of civilization into the vast, empty continent and its effect upon Americans’ concept of themselves as “nature’s nation.” The essays first concentrate on Puritan covenant theology and its gradual adaptation to changing condition in America: the decline in zeal for a “Bible commonwealth,” the growth of trade and industry, and the necessity for coexisting with large masses of unchurched people. As the book progresses, the emphasis shifts from religion to the philosophy of nature to the development of an original literature, although Miller is usually analyzing simultaneously all three aspects of the American quest for self-identity. In the final essays, he shows how the forces that molded the self-conscious articulateness of the early New Englanders still operate in the work of contemporary American writers." - from the publisher

"The 1966 edition of this book has be­come a standard work. In this new, re­vised edition, Pizer has dropped three chapters and has refined and extended the work by adding six: “American Liter­ary Naturalism: An Approach Through Form,” “American Literary Naturalism: The Example of Dreiser,” “The Prob­lem of Philosophy in the Naturalistic Novel,” “Hamlin Garland’s 1891 Main-Travelled Roads: Local Color as Art,” “Jack London: The Problem of Form,” and “Dreiser’s ‘Nigger Jeff’: The Devel­opment of an Aesthetic.” The book contains definitions of real­ism and naturalism based on representa­tive novels of the period ranging from Howells’ Rise of Silas Lapham to Crane’s Red Badge of Courage; analyses of the literary criticism of the age, stressing that of Howells, Garland, and Norris; and close readings of specific works by major figures of the period." - from the publisher

"Essays discuss the movement's characteristics; the emergence of naturalism; issues of class, race, and gender; the portrayal of American character; and the continuing influences of Realism in the modern era." - from the publisher

"This book traces the central developments in American literature between and 1919. It opens with an account of the consolidation of realism as the dominant standard of critical value and brings the reader forward to the moment, at the end of World War I, when American writers began to take a recognized place among the masters of literary modernism. The ascendancy of the novel as the principal genre of the realists is presented against a broader cultural and historical background. Professor Berthoff reviews and evaluates American fiction from the time when Howells, Twain, and Henry James were still under attack by old-school idealizers, to the emergence of a new critical and testamentary realism with Crane, Dreiser, and Gertrude Stein. He shows how the writers under discussion reacted to the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, to foreign literary currents, innovations in journalism, contemporary events, and to changing mores. Using specific examples and direct quotations, Professor Berthoff appraises the strengths and limitations of each. All his discussions, even of secondary writers, are rounded out with a wide range of critical opinion. This approach gives depth and objectivity to the examination of a turbulent and vigorously creative age in American letters. During this period the writings of Henry Adams, Henry George, William James, Thorstein Veblen, and others, though primarily concerned with disciplined reflective inquiry, were part of the essential imaginative effort of realism. The master works of this highly literate group of speculative thinkers had a profound effect on the literature of the era and on the era directly following. Important figures discussed in the final chapters of this history include Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Frank Norris, Vachel Lindsay and Jack London. Professor Berthoff notes that there is no manifesto or turning point in literature exactly comparable to the turning point in American art created by the Armory Show of 1913. But the emergence in a single generation of Robinson, Frost, Stevens, Pound, Anderson, Stein, O'Neill, and Eliot was to have immense influence, not only in America but throughout the Western world. The thirty-five years that this book spans are among the most important and interesting in the history of American letters. The main currents traced are still vital, and the principal writers of this period are as important now as they were then." - from the publisher

"Out of many, one e pluribus unum is the motto of the American nation, and it sums up neatly the paradox that Stephanie Foote so deftly identifies in Regional Fictions. Regionalism, the genre that ostensibly challenges or offers an alternative to nationalism, in fact characterizes and perhaps even defines the American sense of nationhood. In particular, Foote argues that the colorful local characters, dialects, and accents that marked regionalist novels and short stories of the late nineteenth century were key to the genre’s conversion of seemingly dangerous political differences such as those posed by disaffected Midwestern farmers or recalcitrant foreign nationals into appealing cultural differences. She asserts that many of the most treasured beliefs about the value of local identities still held in the United States today are traceable to the discourses of this regional fiction, and she illustrates her contentions with insightful examinations of the work of Sarah Orne Jewett, Hamlin Garland, Gertrude Atherton, George Washington Cable, Jacob Riis, and others. Broadening the definitions of regional writing and its imaginative territory, Regional Fictions moves beyond literary criticism to comment on the ideology of national, local, ethnic, and racial identity." - from the publisher

"Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is a study of literary regionalism. It focuses on the fiction of the United States and considers the place of the genre in world literature. Regionalism is usually understood to be a literature bound to the local, but this study explores how regional writing shapes ways of imagining not only the neighborhood or the province, but also the nation, and ultimately the world. Its key premise is that thinking about place always entails imagining time. It analyzes how concepts crystallize across disciplines and in everyday discourse and proposes ways of revising American literary history and close readings of particular authors' work. It demonstrates, for example, the importance of the figure of the school-teacher and the one-room schoolhouse in local color and subsequent place-focused writing. Such representations embody the contested relation in modernity between localities and the knowledge they produce, and books that carry metropolitan and cosmopolitan learning. The volume discusses fiction from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, including works by Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton, Sarah Orne Jewett, Ernest Gaines, Wendell Berry, and Ursula LeGuin as well as romance novels and regional mysteries." - from the publisher

"Tracing New England's literary emergence through the early national and antebellum periods, author Lawrence Buell combines intensive study of texts by such major figures as Emerson, Hawthorne, and Dickinson with analyses of works by a great range of other New England writers. The result is a new and deeper look at the rise of American literary professionalism, the meaning and significance of Neoclassicism and Romanticism in America, and the conventions and ideology of some of the period's most distinctive genres." - from the publisher

"For more than half a century, Malcolm Cowley (1898-1989) cast a long shadow across the landscape of American literary criticism, forming our views of luminaries like Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway and enhancing our understanding of dozens of others. A transplanted but long-time New Englander, Cowley focused much of his critical attention on the region's plethora of eminent authors, and this collection combines those essays with his writings about the New England he knew and loved. Cowley is equally at home with Hawthorne, James, Emerson, Melville, Frost, Aiken, Cheever, Cummings - and the characters and customs of his adoptive region. In a poem included here, Cowley writes of his wish to love the earth and 'to speak some words in patterns that will be remembered.' This book is testimony to his gift for - and fulfillment of - both." - from the publisher

"Now in paperback, this is the landmark critical study of the nineteenth-century New England local color school of literature. Mapping out the literary history of what was exclusively a women's tradition, Josephine Donovan describes its evolution through the careers of several well-known, but for the most part unjustly overlooked, writers. This group, which centered around Annie Adams Fields, includes Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sarah Orne Jewett, Rose Terry Cooke, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. Discussing their work in detail, Dr. Donovan shows how each writer rejected romantic stereotypes and depicted strong women in realistic local settings, thereby calling attention to the issues of female solidarity, sexist oppression, and other real concerns of women's lives." - from the publisher

"Dawnland Voices calls attention to the little known but extraordinarily rich literary traditions of New England's Native Americans. This pathbreaking anthology includes both classic and contemporary literary works from ten New England indigenous nations: the Abenaki, Maliseet, Mi'kmaq, Mohegan, Narragansett, Nipmuc, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Schaghticoke, and Wampanoag. Through literary collaboration and recovery, Siobhan Senier and Native tribal historians and scholars have crafted a unique volume covering a variety of genres and historical periods. From the earliest petroglyphs and petitions to contemporary stories and hip-hop poetry, this volume highlights the diversity and strength of New England Native literary traditions. Dawnland Voices introduces readers to the compelling and unique literary heritage in New England, banishing the misconception that "real" Indians and their traditions vanished from that region centuries ago." - from the publisher

" The story of New England writing begins some 400 years ago, when a group of English Puritans crossed the Atlantic believing that God had appointed them to bring light and truth to the New World. Over the centuries since, the people of New England have produced one of the great literary traditions of the world--an outpouring of poetry, fiction, history, memoirs, letters, and essays that records how the original dream of a godly commonwealth has been both sustained and transformed into a modern secular culture enriched by people of many backgrounds and convictions. Writing New England, edited by the literary scholar and critic Andrew Delbanco, is the most comprehensive anthology of this tradition, offering a full range of thought and style. The major figures of New England literature--from John Winthrop and Anne Bradstreet to Emerson, Hawthorne, Dickinson, and Thoreau, to Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and John Updike--are of course represented, often with fresh and less familiar selections from their works. But Writing New England also samples a wide range of writings including Puritan sermons, court records from the Salem witch trials, Felix Frankfurter's account of the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, William Apess's eulogy for the Native American King Philip, pamphlets and poems of the Revolution and the Civil War, natural history, autobiographical writings of W. E. B. Du Bois and Malcolm X, Mary Antin's account of the immigrant experience, John F. Kennedy's broadcast address on civil rights, and A. Bartlett Giamatti's memoir of a Red Sox fan. Organized thematically, this anthology provides a collective self-portrait of the New England mind. With an introductory essay on the origins of New England, a detailed chronology, and explanatory headnotes for each selection, the book is a welcoming introduction to a great American literary tradition and a treasury of vivid writing that defines what it has meant, over nearly four centuries, to be a New Englander." - from the publisher

"The Dictionary of Midwestern Literature, Volume One, surveys the lives and writings of nearly 400 Midwestern authors and identifies some of the most important criticism of their writings. The Dictionary is based on the belief that the literature of any region simultaneously captures the experience and influences the worldview of its people, reflecting as well as shaping the evolving sense of individual and collective identity, meaning, and values. Volume One presents individual lives and literary orientations and offers a broad survey of the Midwestern experience as expressed by its many diverse peoples over time. Philip A. Greasley's introduction fills in background information and describes the philosophy, focus, methodology, content, and layout of entries, as well as criteria for their inclusion. An extended lead-essay, "The Origins and Development of the Literature of the Midwest," by David D. Anderson, provides a historical, cultural, and literary context in which the lives and writings of individual authors can be considered. This volume is the first of an ambitious three-volume series sponsored by the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature and created by its members. Volume Two will provide similar coverage of non-author entries, such as sites, centers, movements, influences, themes, and genres. Volume Three will be a literary history of the Midwest. One goal of the series is to build understanding of the nature, importance, and influence of Midwestern writers and literature. Another is to provide information on writers from the early years of the Midwestern experience, as well as those now emerging, who are typically absent from existing reference works."

" Critical Insights: Midwestern Literature brings together fifteen original essays that survey the critical conversation regarding Midwestern literature, explore its cultural and historical contexts and offer close and comparative reading of key texts in the genre that covers 12 states in the center of the country - Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and North and South Dakota. Many of the essays in Critical Insights: Midwestern Literature reexamine how Midwestern literature is designed, consider whether the region is somewhere or nowhere (and why that matters), and how authors might use absence itself as a location for setting not possible elsewhere. The essays also expand the bounds of what we usually think to be literature in a narrower sense by including humor and sports as essential ingredients in an author’s repertoire. For readers who are studying the theme for the first time, four overview essays survey the historical and cultural context of Midwestern literature, present how critical commentary on the literature took shape over time, and explore Midwestern plays and playwrights over three centuries. Readers seeking a deeper understanding of Midwestern literature can then move on to other essays that explore it in depth through a variety of critical approaches. Works that may be discussed include Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Winter Dreams, Garrison Keillor’s Home, and Saul Bellow’s Looking for Mr. Green. Each essay is 2,500 to 5,000 words in length, and all essays conclude with a list of "Works Cited," along with endnotes." - from the publisher

"Drawing on recent studies in cultural geography, environmental history, and mythology, as well as literary criticism, The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland relates Midwestern pastoral writers to their local geographies and explains their approaches. William Barillas treats five important Midwestern pastoralists - Willa Cather, Aldo Leopold, Theodore Roethke, James Wright, and Jim Harrison - in separate chapters. He also discusses Jane Smiley, U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, Paul Gruchow, and others." "For these writers, the aim of writing is not merely intellectual and aesthetic, but democratic and ecological. In depicting and promoting commitment to local communities, human and natural, they express their love for, their understanding of, and their sense of place in the American Midwest." "Students and serious readers, as well as scholars in the growing field of literature and the environment, will appreciate this study of writers who counter placelessness and materialism in modern society." - from the publisher

"Though he'd lived in Iowa all his life, the allure of the prairie had somehow eluded John Price - until, after a catastrophic flood, a brief glimpse of native wildlife suddenly brought his surroundings home to him. Not Just Any Land is a memoir of Price's rediscovery of his place in the American landscape and of his search for a new relationship to the life of the prairie - that once immense and beautiful wilderness of grass now so depleted and damaged as to test even the deepest faith.""Price's journey toward a conscious commitment to place takes him to some of America's largest remaining grasslands and brings him face to face with a troubling, but also hopeful personal and environmental legacy. It also leads him through the region's literature and into conversations with contemporary nature writers - Linda Hasselstrom, Dan O'Brien William Least Heat-Moon, and Mary Swander - who have devoted themselves to living in, writing about, and restoring the grasslands. Among these authors Price observes how a commitment to the land can spring from diverse sources, for instance, the generational weight of a family ranch, the rites of wildlife preservation, the "deep maps" of ancestral, memory, and the imperatives of a body inflicted with environmental illness.The resulting narrative is an innovative blend of memoir, nature writing, and literary criticism that bears witness to the essential bonds between spirit, art, and earth." - from the publisher

"Describes the evolving nature of the small Midwestern town, from 1800s to present. Long held as an iconic place in American culture, the reality is more complex. This is a collection of writings from historians, novelists, social scientists, poets and journalists featuring well know authors such as Sherwood Anderson, Carol Bly, Willa Cather, Hamlin Garland, Sinclair Lewis, Garrison Keillor, Mark Twain as well as many lessor know but important writers. The five chronological sections trace the founding, growth and decline of the Midwestern town."

"The North Country Reader is filled with an array of classic and contemporary voices—native Minnesotans and immigrants, farmers and city folks, the sweet and the bittersweet. These timeless selections from novels, short stories, essays, and memoirs convey the diversity of the Minnesota experience. From the jazz-age tales of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the depression-era stories of Gordon Parks to the modern-day concerns of Patricia Hampl and Carol Bly, this collection reminds us of the richness of the place called Minnesota. Taken as a whole these thirty-seven classic pieces reveal that Minnesota is not a single experience, but one as varied as the land it occupies. The authors included are Sheila Alexander, Margaret Culkin Banning, Carol Bly, Emilie Buchwald, Ann Chidester, Borghild Dahl, Emilio DeGrazia, Charles Eastman, Edward Eggleston, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Flandrau, Grace Flandrau, Alvin Greenberg, Paul Gruchow, Patricia Hampl, Jon Hassler, Mary Hedin, Norman Katkov, Garrison Keillor, Herbert Krause, Monica Krawczyk, Meridel Le Sueur, Sinclair Lewis, Peggy Harding Love, Frederick Manfred, John Milton, Martha Ostenso, Lon Otto, Gordon Parks, J. F. Powers, Norval Rindfleisch, Ole R√∂lvaag, Henry R. Schoolcraft, Shirley Schoonover, Mabel Seeley, Robert Treuer, Gerald Vizenor." - from the publisher

"A rich Minnesota literary tradition is brought into the spotlight in this groundbreaking collection of incisive prose and powerful poetry by forty- three black writers who educate, inspire, and reveal the unabashed truth. Historically significant figures tell their stories, demonstrating how much and how little conditions have changed: Gordon Parks hitchhikes to Bemidji, Taylor Gordon describes his first day as a chauffeur in St. Paul, and Nellie Stone Johnson insists on escaping the farm for high school in Minneapolis. A profusionof modern voices-- poet Tish Jones, playwright Kim Hines, and memoirist Frank Wilderson-- reflect the dizzying, complex realities of the present. Showcasing the unique vision and reality of Minnesota's African American community from the Harlem renaissance through the civil rights movement, from the black power movement to the era of hip- hop and the time of America's first black president, this compelling anthology provides an explosion of artistic expression about what it means to be a Minnesotan. Alexs Pate, an award- winning novelist, playwright, and writing professor, is the president of Innocent Technologies, LLC. Pamela R. Fletcher is associate professor of English at St. Catherine University. J. Otis Powell!? is a poet, performance artist, and curator working in an aesthetic rooted in Afrocentric lore and culture"-- Provided by publisher."A rich Minnesota literary tradition is brought into the spotlight in this groundbreaking collection of incisive prose and powerful poetry by forty-three black writers who educate, inspire, and reveal the unabashed truth." - from the publisher

"Few geographical regions of the United States have been more glamorized, mythologized -- and misunderstood -- than the American west. A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West presents an in depth and highly detailed exploration of historic and contemporary cultural expressions rooted in America's western states. Historically and culturally, the west exhibits a richness and depth of cultural expression that is often at odds with the popular imagery. Divided into three thematic sections, the companion offers a series of illuminating essays by literary and cultural scholars to reveal the complexity of the many "wests" in our imagination and reality. The first section considers the west chiefly through a historical lens, both literary and cultural, exploring such topics as exploration and Gold Rush narratives, women's writings, the growth of suburbs, class and postcolonial perspectives, and the myriad of cultural expressions from many of the west's sub-regions and population groups. The chapters in the second section present a more genre-based approach, interpreting such topics as pictorial art, cinema, cowboy poetry, autobiography, nature writing, and detective fiction. In the final part, closer, more sustained readings of specific cases illuminate some of the west's persistent questions and issues, including those related to identity, performance, representation, and marketing. A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West offers a fully realized portrait of the depth and complexity of cultural expressions that continue to emerge from the American west." - from the publisher

"The American West is a complex region that has inspired generations of writers and artists. Often portrayed as a quintessential landscape that symbolizes promise and progress for a developing nation, the American West is also a diverse space that has experienced conflicting and competing hopes and expectations. While it is frequently imagined as a place enabling dreams of new beginnings for settler communities, it is likewise home to longstanding Indigenous populations as well as many other ethnic and racial groups who have often produced different visions of the land. This History encompasses the intricacy of Western American literature by exploring myriad genres and cultural movements, from ecocriticism, settler colonial studies, and transnational theory to race, ethnic, gender, and sexuality studies. Written by a host of leading historians and literary critics, this book offers readers insight into the West as a site that sustains canonical and emerging authors alike, and as a region that exceeds national boundaries in addressing long-standing global concerns and developments." - from the publisher

"Women Writers of the American West, 1833–1927 recovers the names and works of hundreds of women who wrote about the American West during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some of them long forgotten and others better known novelists, poets, memoirists, and historians such as Willa Cather and Mary Austin Holley. Nina Baym mined literary and cultural histories, anthologies, scholarly essays, catalogs, advertisements, and online resources to debunk critical assumptions that women did not publish about the West as much as they did about other regions. Elucidating a substantial body of nearly 650 books of all kinds by more than 300 writers, Baym reveals how the authors showed women making lives for themselves in the West, how they represented the diverse region, and how they represented themselves. Baym accounts for a wide range of genres and geographies, affirming that the literature of the West was always more than cowboy tales and dime novels. Nor did the West consist of a single landscape, as women living in the expanses of Texas saw a different world from that seen by women in gold rush California. Although many women writers of the American West accepted domestic agendas crucial to the development of families, farms, and businesses, they also found ways to be forceful agents of change, whether by taking on political positions, deriding male arrogance, or, as their voluminous published works show, speaking out when they were expected to be silent." - from the publisher

"The literature of the African American West is the last racial discourse of the region that remains unexplored. Blake Allmendinger addresses this void in literary and cultural studies with Imagining the African American West—the first comprehensive study of African American literature on the early frontier and in the modern urban American West. Allmendinger charts the terrain of African American literature in the West through his exploration of novels, histories, autobiographies, science fiction, mysteries, formula westerns, melodramas, experimental theater, and political essays, as well as rap music and film. He examines the histories of James P. Beckwourth and Oscar Micheaux; slavery, the Civil War, and the significance of the American frontier to blacks; and the Harlem Renaissance, the literature of urban unrest, rap music, black noir, and African American writers, including Toni Morrison and Walter Mosley. His study utilizes not only the works of well-known African American writers but also some obscure and neglected works, out-of-print books, and unpublished manuscripts in library archives. Much of the scholarly neglect of the “Black West” can be blamed on how the American West has been imagined, constructed, and framed in scholarship to date. In his study, Allmendinger provides the appropriate theoretical, cultural, and historical contexts for understanding the literature and suggests new directions for the future of black western literature." - from the publisher

"In no other region of the United States has the notion of authenticity played such an important yet elusive role as it has in the West. Though pervasive in literature, popular culture, and history, assumptions about western authenticity have not received adequate critical attention. Given the ongoing economic and social transformations in this vast region, the persistent nostalgia and desire for the real authentic West suggest regional and national identities at odds with themselves. True West explores the concept of authenticity as it is used to invent, test, advertise, and read the West. The fifteen essays collected here apply contemporary critical and cultural theory to western literary history, Native American literature and identities, the visual West, and the imagining of place. Ranging geographically from the Canadian Prairies to Buena Park s Entertainment Corridor in Southern California, and chronologically from early tourist narratives to contemporary environmental writing, True West challenges many assumptions we make about western writing and opens the door to an important new chapter in western literary history and cultural criticism." - from the publisher

"In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American writing, the "West," which comprised the territory between the Appalachian mountains and the Mississippi River, was a ubiquitous topic. Yet this writing is often overlooked in studies of the American West, which reach past this region to the Far Western frontier, and in analyses of whites and Native Americans, which typically focus on moments of contact. Tracing historic events in the early westward movement, The First West: Writing from the American Frontier 1776-1860 brings together a unique and extensive range of writers and texts. Many of the texts produced in and about this "first West" have not been reprinted until now. The book's selections include government documents and treaties, land-promotion schemes, white depictions of natives, native accounts of whites, easterners describing westerners, westerners describing easterners, and literary texts. Several selections concern contact and conquest, while others focus on community building in the wake of westward-moving white settlement. The volume includes literary and nonliterary writing from such well-known figures as Thomas Jefferson, William Bartram, Margaret Fuller, Black Hawk, Caroline Kirkland, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, and Abraham Lincoln. It also features writing from lesser-known individuals including William Warren, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Rebecca Burlend, Daniel Drake, Eliza Farnham, and Gideon Lincecum. Demonstrating a strikingly vital interracial, interregional, and intercultural dialogue, The First West illustrates the continuing diversification of American cultural history. An exceptional text for courses in American literature and history, it challenges students' ideas about the American frontier, the West, and the processes of contact, settlement, community, and class." - from the publisher

"The story of western literature is the story of two Wests, the one immediately and deeply persuasive, the second more complex in its intentions and effects. This anthology, gathered and introduced by distinguished western scholar Thomas J. Lyon, offers the panoramic literary range of the American West, from the romance of the mythic Wild West to the present-day creative explosion of the real, diverse West. With more than forty selections, including essays, short stories, poetry, excerpts from novels and diaries, and a complete play, this authoritative and adventuresome collection shows why the West has occupied such a prominent place in the national consciousness, and reveals that western writers may currently be mapping out a significant development in American thought." - from the publisher

"This new edition of Southern Writers assumes its distinguished predecessor's place as the essential reference on literary artists of the American South. Broadly expanded and thoroughly revised, it boasts 604 entries-nearly double the earlier edition's-written by 264 scholars. For every figure major and minor, from the venerable and canonical to the fresh and innovative, a biographical sketch and chronological list of published works provide comprehensive, concise, up-to-date information. Here in one convenient source are the South's novelists and short story writers, poets and dramatists, memoirists and essayists, journalists, scholars, and biographers from the colonial period to the twenty-first century. What constitutes a "southern writer" is always a matter for debate. Editors Joseph M. Flora and Amber Vogel have used a generous definition that turns on having a significant connection to the region, in either a personal or literary sense. New to this volume are younger writers who have emerged in the quarter century since the dictionary's original publication, as well as older talents previously unknown or unacknowledged. For almost every writer found in the previous edition, a new biography has been commissioned. Drawn from the very best minds on southern literature and covering the full spectrum of its practitioners, Southern Writers is an indispensable reference book for anyone intrigued by the subject." - from the publisher

"There are many anthologies of southern literature, but this is the first companion. Neither a survey of masterpieces nor a biographical sourcebook, The Companion to Southern Literature treats every conceivable topic found in southern writing from the pre-Columbian era to the present, referencing specific works of all periods and genres. Top scholars in their fields offer original definitions and examples of the concepts they know best, identifying the themes, burning issues, historical personalities, beloved icons, and common or uncommon stereotypes that have shaped the most significant regional literature in memory. Read the copious offerings straight through in alphabetical order (Ancestor Worship, Blue-Collar Literature, Caves) or skip randomly at whim (Guilt, The Grotesque, William Jefferson Clinton). Whatever approach you take, The Companion’s authority, scope, and variety in tone and interpretation will prove a boon and a delight. Explored here are literary embodiments of the Old South, New South, Solid South, Savage South, Lazy South, and “Sahara of the Bozart.” As up-to-date as grit lit, K Mart fiction, and postmodernism, and as old-fashioned as Puritanism, mules, and the tall tale, these five hundred entries span a reach from Lady to Lesbian Literature. The volume includes an overview of every southern state’s belletristic heritage while making it clear that the southern mind extends beyond geographical boundaries to form an essential component of the American psyche. The South’s lavishly rich literature provides the best means of understanding the region’s deepest nature, and The Companion to Southern Literature will be an invaluable tool for those who take on that exciting challenge." - from the publisher

"These essays provide an account of Southern literature from the mid-1500s to the present, including a review of individual works, their writers and readers, literary trends, cultural movements, and political and economic influences. Organized in four sections, the essays deal with the mind of the antebellum South, the connection between the power of mind and the institution of slavery that stymied scientific and literary growth in the mid-1800s, the Civil War and its aftermath, the turn-of-the-century romance and plantation fiction, and the Fugitives and the Agrarians. The volume provides brief vignettes of figures such as Edger Allan Poe, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Richard Wright, as well as recent writers like Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison and James Dickey, and concludes with an essay on the future of Southern writing. Contributors include Cleanth Brooks, Lewis P. Simpson and Daniel Young." - from the publisher

"Many of America’s foremost, and most beloved, authors are also southern and female: Mary Chesnut, Kate Chopin, Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, Maya Angelou, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, and Lee Smith, to name several. Designating a writer as “southern” if her work reflects the region’s grip on her life, Mary Louise Weaks and Carolyn Perry have produced an invaluable guide to the richly diverse and enduring tradition of southern women’s literature. Their comprehensive history — the first of its kind in a relatively young field — extends from the pioneer woman to the career woman, embracing black and white, poor and privileged, urban and Appalachian perspectives and experiences. The History of Southern Women’s Literature allows readers both to explore individual authors and to follow the developing arc of various genres across time. Conduct books and slave narratives; Civil War diaries and letters; the antebellum, postbellum, and modern novel; autobiography and memoirs; poetry; magazine and newspaper writing — these and more receive close attention. Over seventy contributors are represented here, and their essays discuss a wealth of women’s issues from four centuries: race, urbanization, and feminism; the myth of southern womanhood; preset images and assigned social roles — from the belle to the mammy — and real life behind the facade of meeting others’ expectations; poverty and the labor movement; responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the influence of Gone with the Wind. The History of Southern Women’s Literature tells, ultimately, the story of the search for freedom within an “insidious tradition,” to quote Ellen Glasgow. This teeming volume validates the deep contributions and pleasures of an impressive body of writing and marks a major achievement in women’s and literary studies." - from the publisher

"In the southern United States, there remains a deep need among both black and white writers to examine the topic of race relations, whether they grew up during segregation or belong to the younger generation that graduated from integrated schools. In Race Mixing, Suzanne Jones offers insightful and provocative readings of contemporary novels, the work of a wide range of writers—black and white, established and emerging. Their stories explore the possibilities of cross-racial friendships, examine the repressed history of interracial love, reimagine the Civil Rights era through children's eyes, herald the reemergence of the racially mixed character, investigate acts of racial violence, and interrogate both rural and urban racial dynamics. Employing a dynamic model of the relationship between text and context, Jones shows how more than thirty relevant writers—including Madison Smartt Bell, Larry Brown, Bebe Moore Campbell, Thulani Davis, Ellen Douglas, Ernest Gaines, Josephine Humphreys, Randall Kenan, Reynolds Price, Alice Walker, and Tom Wolfe—illuminate the complexities of the color line and the problems in defining racial identity today. While an earlier generation of black and white southern writers challenged the mythic unity of southern communities in order to lay bare racial divisions, Jones finds in the novels of contemporary writers a challenge to the mythic sameness within racial communities—and a broader definition of community and identity. Closely reading these stories about race in America, Race Mixing ultimately points to new ways of thinking about race relations. "We need these fictions," Jones writes, 'to help us imagine our way out of the social structures and mind-sets that mythologize the past, fragment individuals, prejudge people, and divide communities.'" - from the publisher

"In this major reassessment of the American South and its literature, Richard Gray explores the idea of regionalism by focusing on those writers whose relationship with the South has been particularly problematical. Asking just what it means to belong to a place, a region―and, more specifically, what it implies for certain Americans to call themselves Southerners―he analyzes conflicting notions of the South that have evolved over the past two centuries. In the process, Gray―one of the leading scholars in the field of Southern studies―offers a provocative new reading of many Southern writers and of the whole notion of a Southern tradition." - from the publisher

"Mining the rich literary terrain of an era gone by, these stories epitomize the sometimes mellow, sometimes quixotic Old South. An eclectic selection of writers, including Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe, Katherine Anne Porter, and Kate Chopin, evokes the depth and breadth of Southern history and tradition." - from the publisher

"Rich in irony, sly humor, and vivid, dramatic imagery, the literature of the modern South is a vital amalgam of a once-rural society's storytelling tradition and the painful contradictions and cultural clashes brought about by rapid change. This excellent collection includes works by Truman Capote, James Agee, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Anne Tyler, Reynolds Price, and many others." - from the publisher

"An essential, surprising journey through the history, rituals, and landscapes of the American South--and a revelatory argument for why you must understand the South in order to understand America"-- Provided by publisher."We all think we know the South. Even those who have never lived there can rattle off a list of signifiers: the Civil War, Gone with the Wind, the Ku Klux Klan, plantations, football, Jim Crow, slavery. But the idiosyncrasies, dispositions, and habits of the region are stranger and more complex than much of the country tends to acknowledge. In South to America, Imani Perry shows that the meaning of American is inextricably linked with the South, and that our understanding of its history and culture is the key to understanding the nation as a whole. This is the story of a Black woman and native Alabaman returning to the region she has always called home and considering it with fresh eyes. Her journey is full of detours, deep dives, and surprising encounters with places and people. She renders Southerners from all walks of life with sensitivity and honesty, sharing her thoughts about a troubling history and the ritual humiliations and joys that characterize so much of Southern life. Weaving together stories of immigrant communities, contemporary artists, exploitative opportunists, enslaved peoples, unsung heroes, her own ancestors, and her lived experiences, Imani Perry crafts a tapestry unlike any other. With uncommon insight and breathtaking clarity, South to America offers an assertion that if we want to build a more humane future for the United States, we must center our concern below the Mason-Dixon Line." - from the publisher

"In 1997 Gary Younge explored the American South by retracing the route of the original Freedom Riders of the 1960s. His road trip was a remarkable socio-cultural adventure for an outsider. He was British, journalistically curious, and black. As he traveled by Greyhound bus through the former Confederate states, he experienced an awakening. He felt culturally tied to this strange yet familiar place. Though a Briton by birth and the child of emigrants from Barbados, he felt culturally alien in his native land. In Dixie, however, he met African Americans whose racial distinctiveness was similar to his own. To local blacks he looked like a brother, while sounding intriguingly foreign. As he assessed their political rise in the South, he noted too how African American tradition seemed static and unchanged. It was a refreshing whiff of “home. ” Awakened to his own identity as a black in a predominantly white society and absorbed by a sense of southern myth and racial history, he produced this account, a blend of travel writing, historical research, wit, and social commentary. His probing examination of the Southland gives fresh perspective on race relations in America. Originally published in England, No Place Like Home is “more than a piece of travel writing,” praised the London Evening Standard, “[but] a compelling exploration of racial identity and the problems of growing up clever, black, and angry in small-town Stevenage. . . . Younge is a fine journalist—thoroughgoing, clear-minded, and meticulous, and he writes in a measured, lucid prose. . . . Next, please take a trip around the UK, Gary Younge, and write about it. Your country needs you.'" - from the publisher

"The modernist period was crucial for American literature as it gave writers the chance to be truly innovative and create their own distinct identity. Starting slightly earlier than many guides to modernism this lucid and comprehensive guide introduces the reader to the essential history of the period including technology, religion, economy, class, gender and immigration. These contexts are woven of into discussions of many significant authors and texts from the period. Wagner-Martin brings her years of writing about American modernism to explicate poetry and drama as well as fiction and life-writing. Among the authors emphasized are Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, William Carlos Williams, Mike Gold, James T. Farrell, Clifford Odets, John Steinbeck." - from the publisher

"Accented America is a sweeping study of U.S. literature between 1890-1950 that reveals a long history of English-Only nationalism: the political claim that U.S. citizens must speak a nationally distinctive form of English. This perspective presents U.S. literary works written between the 1890s and 1940s as playfully, painfully, and ambivalently engaged with language politics, thereby rewiring both narrative form and national identity. The United States has always been a densely polyglot nation, but efforts to prove the existence of a nationally specific form of English turn out to be a development of particular importance to interwar modernism. If the concept of a singular, coherent, and autonomous 'American language' seemed merely provocative or ironic in 1919 when H.L. Mencken emblazoned the phrase on his philological study, within a short period of time it would come to seem simultaneously obvious and impossible.Considering the continuing presence of fierce public debates over U.S. English and domestic multilingualisms demonstrates the symbolic and material implications of such debates in naturalization and citizenship law, presidential rhetoric, academic language studies, and the artistic renderings of novelists. Against the backdrop of the period's massive demographic changes, Accented America brings a broadly multi-ethnic set of writers into conversation, including Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, Henry Roth, Nella Larsen, John Dos Passos, Lionel Trilling, Americo Paredes, and Carlos Bulosan. These authors shared an acute sense of linguistic standardization during the interwar era and contend with the defamiliarizing sway of radical experimentation with invented and improper literary vernaculars. Mixing languages, these authors spurn expectations for phonological exactitude to develop multilingual literary aesthetics. Rather than confirming the powerfully seductive subtext of monolingualism-that those who speak alike are ethically and politically likeminded-multilingual modernists composed interwar novels that were characteristically American because, not in spite, of their synthetic syntaxes and enduring strangeness." - from the publisher

"In Virtual Modernism, Katherine Biers offers a fresh view of the emergence of American literary modernism from the eruption of popular culture in the early twentieth century. Employing dynamic readings of the works of Stephen Crane, Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein, she argues that American modernist writers developed a "poetics of the virtual" in response to the rise of mass communications technologies before World War I. These authors' modernist formal experimentation was provoked by the immediate, individualistic pleasures and thrills of mass culture. But they also retained a faith in the representational power of language--and the worth of common experience--more characteristic of realism and naturalism. In competition with new media experiences such as movies and recorded music, they simultaneously rejected and embraced modernity. Biers establishes the virtual poetics of these five writers as part of a larger "virtual turn" in the United States, when a fascination with the writings of Henri Bergson, William James, and vitalist philosophy--and the idea of virtual experience--swept the nation. Virtual Modernism contends that a turn to the virtual experience of language was a way for each of these authors to carve out a value for the literary, both with and against the growth of mass entertainments. This technologically inspired reengagement with experience was formative for American modernism. Situated at the crossing points of literary criticism, philosophy, media studies, and history, Virtual Modernism provides an examination of Progressive Era preoccupations with the cognitive and corporeal effects of new media technologies that traces an important genealogy of present-day concerns with virtuality." - from the publisher

"The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 took the lives of between 50 and 100 million people worldwide, and the United States suffered more casualties than in all the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries combined. Yet despite these catastrophic death tolls, the pandemic faded from historical and cultural memory in the United States and throughout Europe, overshadowed by World War I and the turmoil of the interwar period. In this book, the author reveals the literary and cultural impact of one of the deadliest plagues in history, bringing to light how it shaped canonical works of fiction and poetry. The author shows how and why the contours of modernism shift when we account for the pandemic's hidden but widespread presence. She investigates the miasmic manifestations of the pandemic and its spectral dead in interwar Anglo-American literature, uncovering the traces of an outbreak that brought a nonhuman, invisible horror into every community. The book examines how literature and culture represented the virus's deathly fecundity, as writers wrestled with the scope of mass death in the domestic sphere amid fears of wider social collapse. The author analyzes overt treatments of the pandemic by authors like Katherine Anne Porter and Thomas Wolfe, and its subtle presence in works by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and W. B. Yeats. She uncovers links to the disease in popular culture, from early zombie resurrection to the resurgence of spiritualism. This book brings the influenza pandemic to the center of the era, revealing a vast tragedy that has hidden in plain sight." - from the publisher

"The Harlem Renaissance (1918 -1937) was the most influential single movement in African American literary history. Its key figures include W.E.B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes. The movement laid the groundwork for all later African American literature, and had an enormous impact on later black literature world-wide. With chapters by a wide range of well-known scholars, this Companion is an authoritative and engaging guide to the movement. It first discusses the historical contexts of the Harlem Renaissance, both national and international; then presents original discussions of a wide array of authors and texts; and finally treats the reputation of the movement in later years. Giving full play to the disagreements and differences that energized the renaissance, this Companion presents the best of current wisdom as well as a set of new readings encouraging further exploration of this dynamic field." - from the publisher

"Harlem Speaks showcases the lives and works of the artists, writers and intellectuals behind the stunning outburst of African American culture in the three decades after World War I. In the tradition of the New York Times bestseller Poetry Speaks, the book combines each subject's key works with biographical and critical essays by leading Harlem Renaissance authority Cary Wintz and other experts. The integrated audio CDs feature music, poetry and literary readings, interviews, radio broadcasts, discussions and speeches, bringing the Harlem of legend to vibrant life once again." - from the publisher

"This the first narrative history of the neglected but essential period of African American literature between the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights era. The years between these two indispensable epochs saw the communal rise of Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, and many other influential black writers. While these individuals have been duly celebrated, little attention has been paid to the political and artistic milieu in which they produced their greatest works. With this study, the author recalls the lost history of a crucial era. Looking at the tumultuous decades surrounding World War II, Jackson restores the "indignant" quality to a generation of African American writers shaped by Jim Crow segregation, the Great Depression, the growth of American communism, and an international wave of decolonization. He also reveals how artistic collectives in New York, Chicago, and Washington fostered a sense of destiny and belonging among diverse and disenchanted peoples. As he shows, through contemporary documents, the years that brought us Their Eyes Were Watching God, Native Son, and Invisible Man also saw the rise of African American literary criticism by both black and white critics. Fully exploring the cadre of key African American writers who triumphed in spite of segregation, this work paints a portrait of American intellectual and artistic life in the mid-twentieth century."

"This book explores the transformative energy and excitement that African Americans expressed in aesthetic and civic currents that percolated during the opening of the 20th century and proved to be a force in the modernization of America. This engaging reference text represents the voices of the era in poetry and prose, in full or excerpted from anecdotes, editorials, essays, manifestoes, orations, and reminiscences, with appearances by major figures and often overlooked contributors to the Harlem Renaissance. Organized topically and, within topics, chronologically, the volume reaches beyond the typical representation of the spirit and substance of the movement, examinations of which are typically confined to the New York City community and from U.S. entry into World War I in 1917 to the depths of the Great Depression in 1935. It carries readers from the opening of the Harlem Renaissance, which began at the top of the 20th century, to its heights in the 1920s and '30s and through to its artistic and literary echoes in the shadows of World War II (1939–1945)." - from the publisher

"The Harlem Renaissance is considered one of the most significant periods of creative and intellectual expression for African Americans. Beginning as early as 1914 and lasting into the 1940s, this era saw individuals reject the stereotypes of African Americans and confront the racist, social, political, and economic ideas that denied them citizenship and access to the American Dream. While the majority of recognized literary and artistic contributors to this period were black males, African American women were also key contributors. Black Women of the Harlem Renaissance Era profiles the most important figures of this cultural and intellectual movement." - from the publisher

"In the midst of vast cultural and political shifts in the early twentieth century, politicians and cultural observers variously hailed and decried the rise of the "new Negro." This phenomenon was most clearly manifest in the United States through the outpouring of Black arts and letters and social commentary known as the Harlem Renaissance. What is less known is how far afield of Harlem that renaissance flourished--how much the New Negro movement was actually just one part of a collective explosion of political protest, cultural expression, and intellectual debate all over the world. In this volume, the Harlem Renaissance "escapes from New York" into its proper global context. These essays recover the broader New Negro experience as social movements, popular cultures, and public behavior spanned the globe from New York to New Orleans, from Paris to the Philippines and beyond. Escape from New York does not so much map the many sites of this early twentieth-century Black internationalism as it draws attention to how New Negroes and their global allies already lived. Resituating the Harlem Renaissance, the book stresses the need for scholarship to catch up with the historical reality of the New Negro experience. This more comprehensive vision serves as a lens through which to better understand capitalist developments, imperial expansions, and the formation of brave new worlds in the early twentieth century." - from the publisher

"Although literary postmodernism has been defined in terms of difference, multiplicity, heterogeneity, and plurality, some of the most vaunted authors of postmodern American fiction--such as Thomas Pynchon, Paul Auster, and other white male authors--often fail to adequately represent the distinct subjectivities of African Americans, American Indians, Latinos and Latinas, women, the poor of the center, and the global periphery. In this groundbreaking study, W. Lawrence Hogue exposes the ways in which much postmodern American literature privileges a typically Eurocentric, male-oriented type of subjectivity, often at the expense of victimizing or objectifying the ethnic or gendered Other. In contrast to the dominant white male perspective on postmodernism, Hogue points to African American, American Indian, and women authors within the American postmodern canon--Rikki Ducornet, Kathy Acker, Ishmael Reed, and Gerald Vizenor--who work against these structures of stereotype and bias, resulting in a literary postmodernism that more genuinely respects and represents difference. He argues that most postmodern African American, American Indian, and women writers experience and write about postmodernity in ways that are substantially different from white men, since they are intimately concerned with the existence of racism and sexism." - from the publisher

"Kerouac. Ginsberg. Burroughs. These are the most famous names of the Beat Generation--but in fact they were only the front line of a much more wide-ranging literary and cultural movement. This critical history takes readers through key works by these authors, but also radiates out to discuss dozens more writers and their works, showing how they all contributed to one of the most far-reaching literary movements of the post-World-War-II era. Moving from the early 1940s to the late 1960s, this book explores key aesthetic and thematic innovations of the Beat writers, the pervasiveness of the Beatnik caricature, the role of the counterculture in the post-war era, the involvement of women in the Beat project, and the changing face of Beat political engagement during the Vietnam War era." - from the publisher

"Readers and acolytes of the Beat Generation tend to be familiar with the prose and poetry of the seminal writers of this period: Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane di Prima, and many others. Yet all of these authors, as well as other less well-known Beat figures, also wrote plays - and these, together with their countercultural approaches to what could or should happen in the theatre - shaped the dramatic experiments of the playwrights who came after them, from Rochelle Owens to Sam Shepard, to the many vanguard performance artists of the seventies. This volume, the first of its kind, gathers essays about the exciting dramatic work of the Beat Generation, ranging from its well-known representatives such as Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, to the 'Afro-Beats' - LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Bob Kaufman, and others. It offers original studies of the women Beats - di Prima, Bunny Lang - as well as groups like the Living Theater who in this era first challenged the literal and physical boundaries of the performance space itself." - from the publisher

"The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature offers a comprehensive survey of the field, from its emergence in the mid-twentieth century to the present day. It offers an unparalleled examination of all facets of postmodern writing that helps readers to understand how fiction and poetry, literary criticism, feminist theory, mass media, and the visual and fine arts have characterized the historical development of postmodernism. Covering subjects from the Cold War and countercultures to the Latin American Boom and magic realism, this History traces the genealogy of a literary tradition while remaining grounded in current scholarship. It also presents new critical approaches to postmodern literature that will serve the needs of students and specialists alike. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History will not only engage readers in contemporary debates but also serve as a definitive reference for years to come." - from the publisher

"Cool Characters tells the story of American political irony from World War II to the present: how irony came to seem politically subversive for American countercultural rebels; how mainstream culture allegedly co-opted countercultural irony; how irony became part of major critical theories of postmodernism; and how -- starting in the late 1980s -- innovative writers developed an idea of "postirony" with the hope of overcoming the political limitations of postmodern irony. To chart the shift from irony to postirony, and show what relationship culture has to politics, the book offers intensive analyses of important American countercultural figures: the hipster, the punk, a figure the author calls "the believer," the coolhunter, and the occupier; and new interpretations of important works by Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Michael Muhammad Knight, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Alex Shakar, William Gibson, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Lethem, and Rachel Kushner." - from the publisher

"Drawing on more than thirty novels by nineteen writers, Fables of Subversion is both a survey of mid-twentieth-century American fiction and a study of how these novels challenged the conventions of satire. Steven Weisenburger focuses on the rise of a radically subversive mode of satire from 1930 to 1980. This postmodern satire, says Weisenburger, stands in crucial opposition to corrective, normative satire, which has served a legitimizing function by generating, through ridicule, a consensus on values. Weisenburger argues that satire in this generative mode does not participate in the oppositional, subversive work of much twentieth-century art.Chapters focus on theories of satire, early subversions of satiric conventions by Nathanael West, Flannery O'Connor, and John Hawkes, the flowering of "Black Humor" fictions of the sixties, and the forms of political and encyclopedic satire prominent throughout the period. Many of the writers included here, such as Vladimir Nabokov, William Gaddis, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Coover, and Thomas Pynchon, are acknowledged masters of contemporary humor. Others, such as Mary McCarthy, Chester Himes, James Purdy, Charles Wright, and Ishmael Reed, have not previously been considered in this context. Posing a seminal challenge to existing theories of satire, Fables of Subversion explores the iconoclastic energies of the new satires as a driving force in late modern and postmodern novel writing." - from the publisher

"Although literary postmodernism has been defined in terms of difference, multiplicity, heterogeneity, and plurality, some of the most vaunted authors of postmodern American fiction--such as Thomas Pynchon, Paul Auster, and other white male authors--often fail to adequately represent the distinct subjectivities of African Americans, American Indians, Latinos and Latinas, women, the poor of the center, and the global periphery. In this groundbreaking study, W. Lawrence Hogue exposes the ways in which much postmodern American literature privileges a typically Eurocentric, male-oriented type of subjectivity, often at the expense of victimizing or objectifying the ethnic or gendered Other. In contrast to the dominant white male perspective on postmodernism, Hogue points to African American, American Indian, and women authors within the American postmodern canon--Rikki Ducornet, Kathy Acker, Ishmael Reed, and Gerald Vizenor--who work against these structures of stereotype and bias, resulting in a literary postmodernism that more genuinely respects and represents difference. He argues that most postmodern African American, American Indian, and women writers experience and write about postmodernity in ways that are substantially different from white men, since they are intimately concerned with the existence of racism and sexism." - from the publisher

"In this book, James Longenbach develops a fresh approach to major American poetry after modernism. Rethinking the influential "breakthrough" narrative, the oft-told story of post-modern poets throwing off their modernist shackles in the 1950s, Longenbach offers a more nuanced perspective. Reading a diverse range of poets - John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Amy Clampitt, Jorie Graham, Richard Howard, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Robert Pinsky, and Richard Wilbur - Longenbach reveals that American poets since mid-century have not so much disowned their modernist past as extended elements of modernism that other readers have suppressed or neglected to see. In the process, Longenbach allows readers to experience the wide variety of poetries written in our time - without asking us to choose between them." - from the publisher

"This anthology generated great interest on its publication in 1994, bringing together experimental poets and movements from 1950 to the present in one groundbreaking volume. Now, two decades later, Paul Hoover has revised and updated it for twenty-first-century readers. His revised introduction argues that new technologies have given postmodern poets a fresh field of play for longstanding practices such as "harvesting" and playing with "found text." The updated contents feature 114 poets, 583 poems, and selections from 19 poetics essays. Representing the full historical sweep--from the Beat movement, the New York School, and the language movements to 21st-century developments like cyberpoetry and Flarf, this anthology makes 'the avant-garde accessible' (Chicago Tribune) for a new generation of readers." - from the publisher

"Each generation revises literary history and this is nowhere more evident than in the post-Second World War period. This Companion offers a comprehensive, authoritative and accessible overview of the diversity of American fiction since the Second World War. Essays by nineteen distinguished scholars provide critical insights into the significant genres, historical contexts, cultural diversity and major authors during a period of enormous American global political and cultural power. This power is overshadowed, nevertheless, by national anxieties growing out of events ranging from the Civil Rights Movement to the rise of feminism; from the Cold War and its fear of Communism and nuclear warfare to the Age of Terror and its different yet related fears of the 'Other'. American fiction since 1945 has faithfully chronicled these anxieties. An essential reference guide, this Companion provides a chronology of the period, as well as guides to further reading." - from the publisher

"In The Program Era, Mark McGurl offers a fundamental reinterpretation of postwar American fiction, asserting that it can be properly understood only in relation to the rise of mass higher education and the creative writing program. McGurl asks both how the patronage of the university has reorganized American literature and—even more important—how the increasing intimacy of writing and schooling can be brought to bear on a reading of this literature. McGurl argues that far from occasioning a decline in the quality or interest of American writing, the rise of the creative writing program has instead generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with energy and at times brilliance by authors ranging from Flannery O’Connor to Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison. Through transformative readings of these and many other writers, The Program Era becomes a meditation on systematic creativity—an idea that until recently would have seemed a contradiction in terms, but which in our time has become central to cultural production both within and beyond the university. An engaging and stylishly written examination of an era we thought we knew, The Program Era will be at the center of debates about postwar literature and culture for years to come." - from the publisher

"Does the novel have a future? Questions of this kind, which are as old as the novel itself, acquired a fresh urgency at the end of the twentieth-century with the rise of new media and the relegation of literature to the margins of American culture. As a result, anxieties about readership, cultural authority and literary value have come to preoccupy a second generation of postmodern novelists. Through close analysis of several major novels of the past decade, including works by Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Kathryn Davis, Jonathan Franzen and Richard Powers, Late Postmodernism examines the forces shaping contemporary literature and the remarkable strategies American writers have adopted to make sense of their place in culture."

"What Has Happened to Fiction in the Age of Platform Capitalism? Since it was first launched in 1994, Amazon has changed the world of literature. The “Everything Store” has not just transformed how we buy books; it has affected what we buy, and even what we read. In Everything and Less, acclaimed critic Mark McGurl explores this new world where writing is no longer categorized as high or lowbrow, literature or popular fiction. Charting a course spanning from Henry James to E. L. James, McGurl shows that contemporary writing has less to do with writing per se than with the manner of its distribution. This consumerist logic—if you like this, you might also like ...—has reorganized the fiction universe so that literary prize-winners sit alongside fantasy, romance, fan fiction, and the infinite list of hybrid genres and self-published works. This is an innovation to be cautiously celebrated. Amazon’s platform is not just a retail juggernaut but an aesthetic experiment driven by an unseen algorithm rivaling in the depths of its effects any major cultural shift in history. Here all fiction is genre fiction, and the niches range from the categories of crime and science fiction to the more refined interests of Adult Baby Diaper Lover erotica. Everything and Less is a hilarious and insightful map of both the commanding heights and sordid depths of fiction, past and present, that opens up an arresting conversation about why it is we read and write fiction in the first place." - from the publisher