The essays by Americanists concerned with the problem of ideology and its bearing upon American literature and culture.

This book is a meditation on the theme of provincialism in American literature. With careful attention to the historical context, it identifies in the expressions of writers before the Civil War certain qualities of self-doubt and defensiveness, certain perceptions of displacement and decline, so profoundly characteristic as to amount to a defining trait of American literature. As a frontier nation, America lacked an organic culture of its own and embarked on the impossibly difficult task of creating a cultural life from imported forms and ideas. Albert von Frank shows the history of this...

In this book Warren Motley offers an original interpretation of James Fenimore Cooper's career. Whereas most studies of Cooper have centered on the figure of the Leatherstocking - that solitary model of the self-sufficient American hero untrammeled by civilization - this book examines Cooper's interest in the pioneer patriarchs who built new societies in the wilderness. Throughout his career Cooper explored an essential American problem: how to achieve the right balance between freedom and authority. He did this by retelling the story of the frontier settlement and thereby assessing its...

In this major new book John Limon examines the various ways American authors have written in an age increasingly dominated by science. He focuses in particular on Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allen Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne--three highly articulate and alarmed witnesses to the great crisis in modern intellectual history, the professionalization of science. It was, Limon argues, especially difficult for American writers to face this crisis because, since America had been born in an age of expanding scientific consciousness and thus no appeal could be made to traditional, pre-scientific...

This is a thorough account of the many attempts during the 18th and 19th centuries to fashion a distinctly American epic literature from a wide range of potentially heroic New World subjects. McWilliams considers the cultural, political, and literary implications of adapting Enlightenment views of republican progress to a genre that had traditionally celebrated the greatness of warriors. He shows how and why the epic in America had to be transformed from imitative narrative poetry into the new genres of prose history (Irving, Prescott, Parkman), fictional romance (Cooper, Melville), and free...

Sporting with the Gods examines the metaphors of "play," "game," and "sport" as they are reflected in American literature and culture. The "race" for salvation and success, the great "games" of business and politics, the distinctive American version of "fair play," the desperate "game" against an all-powerful opponent and the cruelties of chance and fate by which man becomes the "sport of the gods"--all of these metaphors touch fundamental American beliefs about fate and freedom, competition and chance, finitude and possibility. The book traces the cultural history of these metaphors...

Poet's Prose is the first scholarly work devoted exclusively to American prose poetry and has been recognized as a groundbreaking study in contemporary American poetry. Many recent American poets have been writing prose; Fredman has set out to determine why and what it means. Three central works of American poets' prose are discussed in detail: William Carlos Williams' Kora in Hell, Robert Creeley's Presences, and John Ashbery's Three Poems. In these chapters, Fredman both carefully teaches us how to read these difficult works and examines their philosophical seriousness. In a final chapter...

The Civil War stands vivid in the collective memory of the American public. There has always been a profound interest in the subject, and specifically of Blacks' participation in and reactions to the war and the war's outcome. Almost 200,000 African-American soldiers fought for the Union in the Civil War. Although most were illiterate ex-slaves, several thousand were well educated, free black men from the northern states. The 129 letters in this collection were written by black soldiers in the Union army during the Civil War to black and abolitionist newspapers. They provide a unique...

This far-reaching collection of essays offers a serious and thought-provoking account of the complexities spawned by cross-cultural interpretation. The essays hold broad implications for issues spanning the range of literary criticism: the relations of text and context; the usefulness of genre as a defining term; the consequences of binary thinking; the links between practical criticism and literary theory; and--perhaps most explosively--from the visions and revisions invoked by shifting notions of nationality to the unpredictable attitudes toward gender and sexual difference entertained by...

Worlds of Hurt presents a coherent rendering of the relationships between individual trauma and cultural interpretation, using as its focus the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, and the phenomenon of sexualized violence against women. Survivors of these traumas constitute themselves as unique communities and bear witness to their traumatic experiences both privately and publicly. The survivors themselves write a "literature of trauma"--born of the need to tell and retell the story of the traumatic experience, to make it "real" to the victim, the community and to the larger pyblic.