The Cambridge history of American literature

Author(s)

• Bercovitch, Sacvan
• Patell, Cyrus R. K.

Bibliographic Information

The Cambridge history of American literature

general editor, Sacvan Bercovitch ; associate editor, Cyrus R.K. Patell

Cambridge University Press, 1994-

• v. 1 : hbk
• v. 2 : hbk
• v. 3 : hbk
• v. 4 : hbk
• v. 5 : hbk
• v. 6 : hbk
• v. 7 : hbk
• v. 8 : hbk

Note

Associate editor, Cyrus R.K. Patell not appears in v. 3, 5-8

Contents: v. 1. 1590-1820 -- v. 2. Prose writing, 1820-1865 -- v. 3. Prose writing, 1860-1920 -- v. 4. Nineteenth-century poetry, 1800-1910 -- v. 5. Poetry and criticism, 1900-1950 -- v. 6. Prose writing, 1910-1950 -- v. 7. Prose writing, 1940-1990 -- v. 8. Poetry and criticism, 1940-1995

Includes chronology, bibliographical references and index

Description and Table of Contents

Volume

v. 1 : hbk ISBN 9780521301053

Description

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.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The literature of colonisation Myra Jehlen
• 2. New England puritan literature Emory Elliott
• 3. British-American belles lettres David S. Shields
• 4. The American enlightenment 1750-1820 Robert A. Ferguson
• 5. The literature of the revolutionary and early national periods Michael T. Gilmore
• Chronology
• Bibliography
• Index.

Volume

v. 2 : hbk ISBN 9780521301060

Description

This is the fullest and richest account of the American Renaissance available in any literary history. The narratives in this volume made for a four-fold perspective on literature: social, cultural, intellectual and aesthetic. Michael D. Bell describes the social conditions of the literary vocation that shaped the growth of a professional literature in the United States. Eric Sundquist draws upon broad cultural patterns: his account of the writings of exploration, slavery, and the frontier is an interweaving of disparate voices, outlooks and traditions. Barbara L. Packer's sources come largely from intellectual history: the theological and philosophical controversies that prepared the way for transcendentalism. Jonathan Arac's categories are formalist: he sees the development of antebellum fiction as a dialectic of prose genres, the emergence of a literary mode out of the clash of national, local and personal forms. Together, these four narratives constitute a basic reassessment of American prose-writing between 1820 and 1865. It is an achievement that will remain authoritative for our time and that will set new directions for coming decades in American literary scholarship.

Table of Contents

• Conditions of Literary Vocation, 1820-1850 Michael D. Bell
• 2. The literature of the expansion and race conflict Eric Sundquist
• 3. The transcendentalists Barbara L. Packer
• Narrative forms Jonathan Arac.

Volume

v. 3 : hbk ISBN 9780521301077

Description

This volume covers a pivotal era in the formation of American identity. Four leading scholars connect the literature with the massive historical changes then underway. Richard Brodhead describes the foundation of a permanent literary culture in America. Nancy Bentley locates the origins of nineteenth century Realism in an elite culture's responses to an emergent mass culture, embracing high literature (writers like William Dean Howells and Henry James) as well as a wide spectrum of cultural outsiders: African Americans, women, and Native Americans. Walter Benn Michaels emphasizes the critical role that turn-of-the-century fiction played in the re-evaluation of the individual at the advent of modern bureaucracy. Susan L. Mizruchi analyzes the literary responses to a new national heterogeneity that helped shape the multicultural future of modern America. Together, these narratives constitute the richest, most detailed account to date of American literature and culture between 1860 and 1920.

Table of Contents

• Introduction Sacvan Bercovitch
• Part I. The American Literary Field, 1860-1890 Richard H. Brodhead: 1. Cultures of letters
• 2. After the American Renaissance
• 3. Domestic literary culture
• 4. Books for the millions
• 5. Onstage
• 6. Literary high culture
• 7. Out of the center
• 8. A case study: literary regionalism
• 9. Regional writing and the role of the author
• Part II. Literary Forms and Mass Culture, 1870-1920 Nancy Bentley: 1. Museum realism
• 2. Howells, James, and the aesthetic republic
• 3. Women and realist authorship
• 4. Chesnutt and imperial spectacle
• 5. Wharton, travel, and modernity
• 6. Adams, James, DuBois, and social thought
• Part III. Promises of American Life, 1880-1920 Walter Benn Michaels: 1. An American tragedy, or the promise of American life
• 2. The production of visibility
• 3. The contracted heart
• 4. Success
• Part IV. Becoming Multicultural: Culture, Economy, and the Novel, 1860-1920 Susan L. Mizruchi: 1. Introduction
• 2. Remembering civil war
• 3. Social death and the reconstruction of slavery
• 4. Cosmopolitan variations
• 5. Native American sacrifice in an age of progress
• 6. Marketing culture
• 7. Varieties of work
• 8. Corporate America
• 9. Realist utopias
• Chronology
• Bibliography.

Volume

v. 5 : hbk ISBN 9780521301091

Description

This is the fullest account to date of American poetry and literary criticism in the Modernist period. Andrew Dubois and Frank Lentricchia examine the work of Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens. They show how the conditions of literary production in a democratic, market-driven society forced the boldest of the Modernists to try to reconcile their need for commercial remuneration with their knowledge that their commitment to high art might never pay. Irene Ramalho Santos broadens the scope of the poetic scene through attention to a wide diversity of writers - with special emphasis on writers including Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and Langston Hughes. William Cain traces both the rise of an internationalist academic aesthetics and the process by which the study of a distinctive national literature was instituted. Considered together, these three narratives convey the astonishing Modernist poetic achievement in its full cultural, institutional, and aesthetic complexity.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Modernist Lyric in the Culture of Capital Andrew Dubois and Frank Lentricchia: 1. Anthologies and audience, genteel to modern
• 2. Robert Frost
• 3. Wallace Stevens
• 4. T. S. Eliot
• 5. Ezra Pound
• Epilogue
• Part II. Poetry in the Machine Age Irene Ramalho Santos: 1. Gertrude Stein: the poet as master of repetition
• 2. William Carlos Williams: in search of a western dialect
• 3. H. D.: a poet between worlds
• 4. Marianne Moore: a voracity of contemplation
• 5. Hart Crane: tortured with history
• 6. Langston Hughes: the color of modernism
• Part III. Literary Criticism William Cain: Preface
• 1. Inventing American literature
• 2. Intellectuals, cultural critics, men and women of letters
• 3. Southerners, agrarians, and New Critics: the institutions of a modern criticism.

Volume

v. 6 : hbk ISBN 9780521497312

Description

Volume 6 of The Cambridge History of American Literature explores the emergence and flowering of modernism in the United States. David Minter provides a cultural history of the American novel from the 'lyric years' to World War I, through post-World War I disillusionment, to the consolidation of the Left in response to the mire of the Great Depression. Rafia Zafar tells the story of the Harlem Renaissance, detailing the artistic accomplishments of such diverse figures as Zora Neal Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and Richard Wright. Werner Sollors examines canonical texts as well as popular magazines and hitherto unknown immigrant writing from the period. Taken together these narratives cover the entire range of literary prose written in the first half of the twentieth century, offering a model of literary history for our times, focusing as they do on the intricate interplay between text and context.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Sacvan Bercovitch and Jonathan Fortescue
• I. A cultural history of the modern American novel David Minter: Prologue
• Part I. A Dream City, Lyric Years, and a Great War: 1. The novel as ironic reflection
• 2. Confidence and uncertainty in The Portrait of a Lady
• 3. Lines of expansion
• 4. Four contemporaries and closing of the west
• 5. Chicago's 'Dream City'
• 6. Frederick Jackson Turner in the dream city
• 7. Henry Adams's Education and the grammar of progress
• 8. Jack London's career and popular discourse
• 9. Innocence in the 'Lyric Years': 1900-1916
• 10. The Armory Show of 1913 and the decline of innocence
• 11. The play of hope and despair
• Part II. Fiction in a Time of Plenty: 12. When the war was over: the return of detachment
• 13. The 'Jazz Age' and the 'Lost Generation' revisited
• 14. The perils of plenty, or how the Twenties acquired a paranoid tilt
• 15. Disenchantment, flight, and the rise of professionalism in an age of plenty
• 16. Class, power, and violence in a new age
• 17. The fear of feminization and the logic of modest ambitions
• 18. Marginality and authority/race, gender and region
• 19. War as metaphor: the example of Ernest Hemingway
• Part III. The Fate of Writing During the Great Depression: 20. The discovery of poverty and the return of commitment
• 21. The search for 'culture' as a form of commitment
• 22. Three responses: the examples of Henry Miller, Djuna Barnes, and John Dos Passos
• 23. Cowboys, detectives and other tough-guy antinomians: residual individualism and hedged commitments
• 24. The search for shared purpose: struggles on the left
• 25. Documentary literature and the disarming of dissent
• 26. The southern renaissance: forms of reaction and innovation
• 27. History and novels/novels and history: the example of William Faulkner
• II. Fictions of the Harlem Renaissance Rafia Zafar: 1. A new Negro?
• 2. Black Manhattan
• 3. Avatars and Manifestos
• 4. At home and homeless in Harlem
• 5. New Negro, New Woman
• 6. Thurman and Nugent
• 7. Minor writers
• 8. Hurston and Wright
• 9. Black Modernism
• III. Ethnic Modernism Werner Sollors: Introduction
• 1. Gertrude Stein and 'Negro Sunshine'
• 2. Ethnic lives and 'lifelets'
• 3. Ethnic themes, modern themes
• 4. Mary Antin: progressive optimism against odds
• 5. Who is 'American'?
• 6. American languages
• 7. 'All the past we leave behind'? Ole E. Rolvaag and the immigrant trilogy
• 8. Modernism, ethnic labeling
• and the quest for wholeness: Jean Toomer's new American race
• 9. Freud, Marx, hard-boiled
• 10. Hemingway spoken here
• 11. Henry Roth: ethnicity, modernity, and modernism
• 12. The clock, the salesman and the beast
• 13. Was modernism anti-totalitarian
• 14. Facing the extreme
• 15. Grand central terminal.

Volume

v. 7 : hbk ISBN 9780521497329

Description

Volume VII of the Cambridge History of American Literature examines a broad range of American literature of the past half-century, revealing complex relations to changes in society. Christopher Bigsby discusses American dramatists from Tennessee Williams to August Wilson, showing how innovations in theatre anticipated a world of emerging countercultures and provided America with an alternative view of contemporary life. Morris Dickstein describes the condition of rebellion in fiction from 1940 to 1970, linking writers as diverse as James Baldwin and John Updike. John Burt examines writers of the American South, describing the tensions between modernization and continued entanglements with the past. Wendy Steiner examines the postmodern fictions since 1970, and shows how the questioning of artistic assumptions has broadened the canon of American literature. Finally, Cyrus Patell highlights the voices of Native American, Asian American, Chicano, gay and lesbian writers, often marginalized but here discussed within and against a broad set of national traditions.

Table of Contents

• 1. The drama from 1940-1990 Christopher Bigsby
• 2. Fiction and society Morris Dickstein
• 3. After the Southern Renaissance John Burt
• 4. Postmodern fictions, 1970-1990 Wendy Steiner
• 5. Emergent literatures Cyrus R. K. Patell.

Volume

v. 8 : hbk ISBN 9780521497336

Description

The Cambridge History of American Literature addresses the broad spectrum of new and established directions in all branches of American writing, and includes the work of scholars and critics who have shaped, and who continue to shape, what has become a major area of literary scholarship. The authors span three decades of achievement in Americanist literary criticism, thereby speaking for the continuities as well as the disruptions sustained between generations of scholarship. Generously proportioned narratives permit a broader vision of American literary history than has previously been possible, allowing the implicit voice of traditional criticism to join forces with the diversity of interests that characterise contemporary literary studies. Volume VIII, concerned with works of poetry and criticism written between 1940 and the present, brings together two different sets of materials and narrative forms, the aesthetic and the institutional. Discarding the traditional synoptic overview of major figures, von Hallberg, Graff, and Carton settle in favour of a history from the inside - a history of interstices and relations, equal to the task of considering the contexts of art, power, and criticism in which it is set.

Table of Contents

• Part I. Poetry, Politics, and Intellectuals Robert Von Hallberg: 1. The place of poetry in the Culture, 1945-1950
• 2. Politics
• 3. Rear-guards
• 4. Avant-gardes
• 5. Authenticity
• 6. Translation
• Conclusion: the place of poets 1995
• Appendix I: Biographies of Poets
• Part II. Criticism Since 1940 Evan Carton and Gerald Graff: Introduction
• 1. Politics and American criticism
• 2. The emergence of academic criticism
• 3. The nationalising of the new criticism
• 4. The canon, the academy, and gender
• 5. Deconstruction and post-structuralism
• 6. From textuality to materiality
• 7. Cultural and historical studies
• Conclusion: academic criticism and its discontents
• Appendix II: Biographies of critics
• Chronology 1940-1945
• Bibliography.

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Details

• NCID: BA22353700
• ISBN:
  • 052130105X
  • 0521301068
  • 0521301076
  • 0521301084
  • 0521301092
  • 0521497310
  • 9780521497329
  • 0521497337
• LCCN: 92042479
• Country Code: uk
• Title Language Code: eng
• Text Language Code: eng
• Place of Publication: Cambridge, U.K. ; New York
• Pages/Volumes: v.
• Size: 24 cm
• Classification:
  • NDC8 : 930.29
  • LCC : PS92
  • DC20 : 810.9
  • NDLC : KS184
• Subject Headings:
  • LCSH : American literature -- History and criticism