Download or read book A History of American Literature written by Richard Gray and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-09-23 with total page 933 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Updated throughout and with much new material, A History of American Literature, Second Edition, is the most up-to-date and comprehensive survey available of the myriad forms of American Literature from pre-Columbian times to the present. The most comprehensive and up-to-date history of American literature available today Covers fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction, as well as other forms of literature including folktale, spirituals, the detective story, the thriller, and science fiction Explores the plural character of American literature, including the contributions made by African American, Native American, Hispanic and Asian American writers Considers how our understanding of American literature has changed over the past?thirty years Situates American literature in the contexts of American history, politics and society Offers an invaluable introduction to American literature for students at all levels, academic and general readers

Download or read book Writing the Nation A Concise Introduction to American Literature 1865 to Present written by Amy Berke and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2023-12-01 with total page 743 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 'Writing the Nation: A Concise Introduction to American Literature 1865 to Present,' editors Amy Berke, Robert Bleil, Jordan Cofer, and Doug Davis curate a comprehensive exploration of American literary evolution from the aftermath of the Civil War to contemporary times. This anthology expertly weaves a tapestry of diverse literary styles and themes, encapsulating the dynamic shifts in American culture and identity. Through carefully selected works, the collection illustrates the rich dialogue between historical contexts and literary expression, showcasing seminal pieces that have shaped American literatures landscape. The diversity of periods and perspectives offers readers a panoramic view of the countrys literary heritage, making it a significant compilation for scholars and enthusiasts alike. The contributing authors and editors, each with robust backgrounds in American literature, bring to the table a depth of scholarly expertise and a passion for the subject matter. Their collective work reflects a broad spectrum of American life and thought, aligning with major historical and cultural movements from Realism and Modernism to Postmodernism. This anthology not only marks the evolution of American literary forms and themes but also mirrors the nations complex history and diverse narratives. 'Writing the Nation' is an essential volume for those who wish to delve into the heart of American literature. It offers readers a unique opportunity to experience the multitude of voices, styles, and themes that have shaped the countrys literary tradition. This collection represents an invaluable resource for students, scholars, and anyone interested in the development of American literature and the cultural forces that have influenced it. The anthology invites readers to engage with the vibrant dialogue among its pages, fostering a deeper understanding and appreciation of the United States' literary and cultural heritage.

Download or read book The Sketch the Tale and the Beginnings of American Literature written by Lydia G. Fash and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accounts of the rise of American literature often start in the 1850s with a cluster of "great American novels"—Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But these great works did not spring fully formed from the heads of their creators. All three relied on conventions of short fiction built up during the "culture of beginnings," the three decades following the War of 1812 when public figures glorified the American past and called for a patriotic national literature. Decentering the novel as the favored form of early nineteenth-century national literature, Lydia Fash repositions the sketch and the tale at the center of accounts of American literary history, revealing how cultural forces shaped short fiction that was subsequently mined for these celebrated midcentury novels and for the first novel published by an African American. In the shorter works of writers such as Washington Irving, Catharine Sedgwick, Edgar Allan Poe, and Lydia Maria Child, among others, the aesthetic of brevity enabled the beginning idea of a story to take the outsized importance fitted to the culture of beginnings. Fash argues that these short forms, with their ethnic exclusions and narrative innovations, coached readers on how to think about the United States’ past and the nature of narrative time itself. Combining history, print history, and literary criticism, this book treats short fiction as a vital site for debate over what it meant to be American, thereby offering a new account of the birth of a self-consciously national literary tradition.

Download or read book The North Carolina Roots of African American Literature written by William L. Andrews and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2006-12-08 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first African American to publish a book in the South, the author of the first female slave narrative in the United States, the father of black nationalism in America--these and other founders of African American literature have a surprising connection to one another: they all hailed from the state of North Carolina. This collection of poetry, fiction, autobiography, and essays showcases some of the best work of eight influential African American writers from North Carolina during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In his introduction, William L. Andrews explores the reasons why black North Carolinians made such a disproportionate contribution (in quantity and lasting quality) to African American literature as compared to that of other southern states with larger African American populations. The authors in this anthology parlayed both the advantages and disadvantages of their North Carolina beginnings into sophisticated perspectives on the best and the worst of which humanity, in both the South and the North, was capable. They created an African American literary tradition unrivaled by that of any other state in the South. Writers included here are Charles W. Chesnutt, Anna Julia Cooper, David Bryant Fulton, George Moses Horton, Harriet Jacobs, Lunsford Lane, Moses Roper, and David Walker.

Download or read book Climate and American Literature written by Michael Boyden and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-04 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Climate has infused the literary history of the United States, from the writings of explorers and conquerors, over early national celebrations of the American climate, to the flowering of romantic nature writing. This volume traces this complex semantic history in American thought and literature to examine rhetorical and philosophical discourses that continue to propel and constrain American climate perceptions today. It explores how American literature from its inception up until the present engages with the climate, both real and perceived. Climate and American Literature attends to the central place that the climate has historically occupied in virtually all aspects of American life, from public health and medicine, over the organization of the political system and the public sphere, to the culture of sensibility, aesthetics and literary culture. It details American inflections of climate perceptions over time to offer revealing new perspectives on one of the most pressing issues of our time.

Download or read book In the Company of Books written by Sarah Wadsworth and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the segmentation of the literary marketplace in 19th century America, this book analyses the implications of the subdivided literary field for readers, writers, and literature itself.

Download or read book The City in American Literature and Culture written by Kevin R. McNamara and published by . This book was released on 2021-08-05 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines what literature and film reveal about the urban USA. Subjects include culture, class, race, crime, and disaster.

Download or read book A Journey Through American Literature written by Kevin J. Hayes and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2012-03-02 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A spirited and lively introduction to American literature, this book acquaints readers with the key authors, works, and events in the nation's rich and eclectic literary tradition.

Download or read book American Literature American Culture written by Gordon Hutner and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 1999 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Literature, American Culture is the first comprehensive anthology of American literary criticism to appear in many years and the first collection to bring together the tradition of American literary criticism as cultural critique. This unique anthology assembles reviews of early works, major critical essays, excerpts from landmark studies, and the most influential examples of the criticism practiced today. The selections address the dominant questions in the American literary tradition: What are the cultural responsibilities of the American writer? What are the characteristics of a national literature? Is a national literature even possible? How do gender and race affect the way we understand literature? What role does literature play in a democratic society? Organized chronologically, the four sections of the volume gather the most vital and enduring arguments in American literary and cultural politics in each era, covering such prominent issues as American exceptionalism, the racial divide, gender, and class identity. The book pays particular attention to the historical background of contemporary debates about multiculturalism. American Literature, American Culture is ideal for undergraduate and graduate courses in American literature, criticism, and American Studies. It also serves as a useful supplementary text in upper-level courses in criticism. Its range proves that at every juncture of the nation's intellectual history, criticism has provided an indispensable way of determining America's most fundamental meanings.

Download or read book The Complete Idiot s Guide to American Literature written by Laurie E. Rozakis and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1999 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at American authors from Washington Irving to John Updike and provides brief biographical sketches, excerpts and summaries of major works, and explanations of major literary movements

Download or read book What is American Literature written by Ilan Stavans and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An incisive, thought-provoking, and timely meditation, at once panoramic and synoptic, on American literature for an age of xenophobia, heightened nationalism, and economic disparity.The distinguished cultural critic Ilan Stavans explores the nation's identity through the prism of its books, from the indigenous past to the early settlers, the colonial period, the age of independence, its ascendance as a global power, and its shallow, fracturing response to the COVID-19 pandemic.The central motives that make the United States a flawed experiment - its celebration of do-it-yourself individualism, its purported exceptionalism, and its constitutional government based on checks and balances - are explored through canonical works like Mark Twain's The Adventures of HuckleberryFinn, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Emily Dickinson's poetry, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the work of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison, and immigrant voices such as those of Americo Paredes, Henry Roth, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jhumpa Lahiri, andothers. This is literary criticism at its best-informed: broad-ranged yet pungent and uncompromising.

Download or read book American Literature in the World written by Wai-chee Dimock and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Literature in the World is an innovative anthology offering a new way to understand the global forces that have shaped the making of American literature. The wide-ranging selections are structured around five interconnected nodes: war; food; work, play, and travel; religions; and human and nonhuman interfaces. Through these five categories, Wai Chee Dimock and a team of emerging scholars reveal American literature to be a complex network, informed by crosscurrents both macro and micro, with local practices intensified by international concerns. Selections include poetry from Anne Bradstreet to Jorie Graham; the fiction of Herman Melville, Gertrude Stein, and William Faulkner; Benjamin Franklin's parables; Frederick Douglass's correspondence; Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders; Langston Hughes's journalism; and excerpts from The Autobiography of Malcom X as well as Octavia Butler's Dawn. Popular genres such as the crime novels of Raymond Chandler, the comics of Art Spiegelman, the science fiction of Philip K. Dick, and recipes from Alice B. Toklas are all featured. More recent authors include Junot Diaz, Leslie Marmon Silko, Jonathan Safran Foer, Edwidge Danticat, Gary Shteyngart, and Jhumpa Lahiri. These selections speak to readers at all levels and invite them to try out fresh groupings and remap American literature. A continually updated interactive component at www.amlitintheworld.yale.edu complements the anthology.

Download or read book Arthur Mervyn or Memoirs of the year 1793 written by Charles Brockden Brown and published by . This book was released on 1859 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Global Remapping of American Literature written by Paul Giles and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book charts how the cartographies of American literature as an institutional category have varied radically across different times and places. Arguing that American literature was consolidated as a distinctively nationalist entity only in the wake of the U.S. Civil War, Paul Giles identifies this formation as extending until the beginning of the Reagan presidency in 1981. He contrasts this with the more amorphous boundaries of American culture in the eighteenth century, and with ways in which conditions of globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century have reconfigured the parameters of the subject. In light of these fluctuating conceptions of space, Giles suggests new ways of understanding the shifting territory of American literary history. ranging from Cotton Mather to David Foster Wallace, and from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Zora Neale Hurston. Giles considers why European medievalism and Native American prehistory were crucial to classic nineteenth-century authors such as Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville. He discusses how twentieth-century technological innovations, such as air travel, affected representations of the national domain in the texts of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. And he analyzes how regional projections of the South and the Pacific Northwest helped to shape the work of writers such as William Gilmore Simms, José Martí, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Gibson. Bringing together literary analysis, political history, and cultural geography, The Global Remapping of American Literature reorients the subject for the transnational era.

Download or read book A Brief History of American Literature written by Richard Gray and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2010-12-28 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Brief History of American Literature offers students and general readers a concise and up-to-date history of the full range of American writing from its origins until the present day. Represents the only up-to-date concise history of American literature Covers fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction, as well as looking at other forms of literature including folktales, spirituals, the detective story, the thriller and science fiction Considers how our understanding of American literature has changed over the past twenty years Offers students an abridged version of History of American Literature, a book widely considered the standard survey text Provides an invaluable introduction to the subject for students of American literature, American studies and all those interested in the literature and culture of the United States

Download or read book American Literature in Context to 1865 written by Susan Castillo and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2010-12-03 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Literature in Context to 1865 discusses the issues and events that engaged American writers of the period, providing original and useful readings of important literary works that demonstrate how context contributes to meaning Covers a range of genres including the myths, chants and songs of indigenous cultures, sermons, slave narratives, essays and the novels and poetry to 1865 Designed to be used alongside the major anthologies of literature from the period Equips students with the necessary historical context needed to understand the writings from this period Pedagogical features include a detailed bibliography, and a transatlantic timeline, with literary works, and historical events

Download or read book After the Fall written by Richard Gray and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-05-03 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the Fall A common refrain heard since the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001 is that “everything has changed.” After the Fall presents a timely and provocative examination of the impact and implications of 9/11 and the war on terror on American culture and literature. Author Richard Gray – widely regarded as the leading European scholar in American literature – reveals the widespread belief among novelists, dramatists, and poets – as well as the American public at large – that in the post-9/11 world they are all somehow living “after the fall.” He carefully considers how many writers, faced with what they see as the end of their world, have retreated into the seductive pieties of home, hearth, and family; and how their works are informed by the equally seductive myth of American exceptionalism. As a counterbalance, Gray also discusses in depth the many writings that “get it right” – transnational and genuinely crossbred works that resist the oppositional and simplistic “us and them” / “Christian and Muslim” language that has dominated mainstream commentary. These imaginative works, Gray believes, choose instead to respond to the heterogeneous character of the United States, as well as its necessary positioning in a transnational context. After the Fall offers illuminating insights into the relationships of such issues as nationalism, trauma, culture, and literature during a time of profound crisis.