* 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
Table of Content
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
1 The First Americans: American Literature During the Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 1
Imagining Eden 1
Writing of the Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 1
2 Inventing Americas: The Making of American Literature 1800-1865 47
Making a Nation 47
The Making of American Myths 47
The Making of American Selves 59
The Making of Many Americas 71
The Making of an American Fiction and Poetry 90
3 Reconstructing the Past, Reimagining the Future: The Development of American Literature 1865-1900 115
Rebuilding a Nation 115
The Development of Literary Regionalisms 115
The Development of Literary Realism and Naturalism 130
The Development of Women’s Writing 143
The Development of Many Americas 148
4 Making It New: The Emergence of Modern American Literature 1900-1945 159
Changing National Identities 159
Between Victorianism and Modernism 159
The Inventions of Modernism 176
Traditionalism, Politics, and Prophecy 211
Community and Identity 226
Mass Culture and the Writer 242
5 Negotiating the American Century: American Literature since 1945 249
Towards a Transnational Nation 249
Formalists and Confessionals 249
Public and Private Histories 263
Beats, Prophets, and Aesthetes 281
The Art and Politics of Race 296
Realism and Its Discontents 314
Language and Genre 328
Creating New Americas 345
Index 373
About the author
Richard Gray is Professor of Literature at the University of Essex and former Distinguished Visiting Professor at a number of universities in the United States. He is the first specialist in American literature to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy and has published over a dozen books on the topic, including the award-winning Writing the South (Ideas of an American Region (1986) and The Life of William Faulkner: A Critical Biography (1944). His History of American Literature is widely considered to be one of the standard works on the subject.
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