A New Literary History of America
A New Literary History of America

Author: Greil Marcus

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2010-01-23

Total Pages: 1129

ISBN-13: 0674265815

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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, A New Literary History of America 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. The meeting of minds is extraordinary as T. J. Clark writes on Jackson Pollock, Paul Muldoon on Carl Sandburg, Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, Sarah Vowell on Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Walter Mosley on hard-boiled detective fiction, Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison, Gerald Early on Tarzan, Bharati Mukherjee on The Scarlet Letter, Gish Jen on Catcher in the Rye, and Ishmael Reed on Huckleberry Finn. From Anne Bradstreet and John Winthrop to Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, from Alexander Graham Bell and Stephen Foster to Alcoholics Anonymous, Life, Chuck Berry, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ronald Reagan, this is America singing, celebrating itself, and becoming something altogether different, plural, singular, new.

A Short History of American Literature (Classic Reprint)
A Short History of American Literature (Classic Reprint)

Author: Walter Cochrane Bronson

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2016-09-15

Total Pages: 506

ISBN-13: 9781333612313

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Excerpt from A Short History of American Literature Throughout the book the literature has been pre sented in its relation to general conditions in America and to the literatures of England and the Continent of Europe, for only so can it be completely understood and its full significance perceived 3 but the personality of the authors and the intrinsic qualities of their work have, it is hoped, received due attention. The division into periods is not meant to be insisted upon too strongly. But some dividing lines must be run for convenience and clearness in treating of so wide and diversified a field, and those adopted are perhaps liable to fewer objections than any others. They have, however, been transgressed freely where it was necessary to do so in order to avoid splitting the discussion of an author's work. In the case of writers with whom the reader is probably not familiar and never need be, the method is chie y descriptive 3 elsewhere the book is intended to be merely a guide in reading and studying the literature itself. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."

Ideology and Classic American Literature
Ideology and Classic American Literature

Author: Sacvan Bercovitch

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 472

ISBN-13: 9780521273091

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For more than a decade, Americanists have been concerned with the problem of ideology, and have undertaken a broad reassessment of American literature and culture. This volume brings together some of the best work in this area.

American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853
American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853

Author: Meredith L. McGill

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2013-10-11

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 0812209745

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The antebellum period has long been identified with the belated emergence of a truly national literature. And yet, as Meredith L. McGill argues, a mass market for books in this period was built and sustained through what we would call rampant literary piracy: a national literature developed not despite but because of the systematic copying of foreign works. Restoring a political dimension to accounts of the economic grounds of antebellum literature, McGill unfolds the legal arguments and political struggles that produced an American "culture of reprinting" and held it in place for two crucial decades. In this culture of reprinting, the circulation of print outstripped authorial and editorial control. McGill examines the workings of literary culture within this market, shifting her gaze from first and authorized editions to reprints and piracies, from the form of the book to the intersection of book and periodical publishing, and from a national literature to an internally divided and transatlantic literary marketplace. Through readings of the work of Dickens, Poe, and Hawthorne, McGill seeks both to analyze how changes in the conditions of publication influenced literary form and to measure what was lost as literary markets became centralized and literary culture became stratified in the early 1850s. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 delineates a distinctive literary culture that was regional in articulation and transnational in scope, while questioning the grounds of the startlingly recent but nonetheless powerful equation of the national interest with the extension of authors' rights.

The Cambridge History of American Literature: Volume 1, 1590-1820
The Cambridge History of American Literature: Volume 1, 1590-1820

Author: Sacvan Bercovitch

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1997-01-28

Total Pages: 846

ISBN-13: 9780521585712

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Volume I of The Cambridge History of American Literature was originally published in 1997, and covers the colonial and early national periods and discusses the work of a diverse assemblage of authors, from Renaissance explorers and Puritan theocrats to Revolutionary pamphleteers and poets and novelists of the new republic. Addressing those characteristics that render the texts distinctively American while placing the literature in an international perspective, the contributors offer a compelling new evaluation of both the literary importance of early American history and the historical value of early American literature.