Approaching post-World War II poetry from a postmodern critical perspective, this study challenges the prevailing assumption that experimental forms signify political opposition while traditional forms are politically conservative. It defines postmodern poetry as a break with modernism's valorization of technique and its implicit collusion with technological progress. It shows how four major postwar poets Frank O'Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, and James Merrill cannot be read as politically conservative because formally traditional or as culturally oppositional because formally...

Early Native American Writing is a collection of critical essays discussing the works of American Indian authors who wrote between 1630 and 1940 and produced some of the earliest literature in North American history. The first collection of critical essays that concentrates on this body of writing, this book highlights the writings of the American Indian authors considered, many only recently rediscovered, as important contributions to American letters.

Writing America Black examines the African American press and selected literary works by black authors. By viewing the journalist's role as historian, reporter, tastemaker, and propagandist, C.K. Doreski reveals the close bond to a larger African American literary tradition. Rich in cultural and historical context, this valuable study will be of interest to readers of literature, history, African American studies, American studies, and journalism.

Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities examines the crossing of literary and social forces that forms the context for being Chicano. Heterotextual poetics reveals how a poetry of the cross can influence identity, in readings ranging from the poetry of gender and race by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz to that of the fragmentary, postmodern subject of Juan Felipe Herrara. Heterotextuality is the medium in which xicanismo is articulated and comes to be a hybrid subject of textual difference.

Walt Whitman looked to many different areas of American culture to develop a distinctively American poetry. This book investigates four of the areas he found most fertile for his own poetic development: the evolution of American dictionaries, the growth of the national sport of baseball, the decimation of American Indians, and the development of American photography. From each of these cultural activities, Whitman absorbed key aesthetic lessons that helped him compose his poetry.

Dos Passos and the Ideology of the Feminine is an original contribution to traditional Dos Passos scholarship, which tends to focus on the author's political agenda. In this book, Janet Casey takes a cultural studies approach that situates both the author and his finest fiction in relation to representations and theorizations of gender in the 1920s and 1930s. Its primary focus is the manner in which Dos Passos responds to prevalent ideas about the feminine, as well as the way that such ideas have affected his ongoing reputation.

Kenneth Asher examines the influence of French reactionary thinking on Eliot's prose and poetry and argues that this political inheritance provided the intellectual framework Eliot employed throughout his career.

In an attempt to lend a more nuanced ear to the ongoing dialogue between African and Jewish Americans, Emily Budick examines the works of a range of writers, critics, and academics from the 1950s through the 1980s. This study records conversations both explicit, such as essays and letters, and indirect, such as the fiction of Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Alice Walker, Cynthia Ozick, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin. The purpose is to understand how this dialogue has engendered misperceptions and misunderstandings, and how blacks and Jews in America have both sought and resisted...

Edith Wharton emerges in this book as a novelist of morals (rather than manners). Behind her polished portraits of upper-class New York life is a thoughtful, questioning spirit. This book analyzes Wharton's religion and philosophy in short stories and seven major novels. It considers Wharton in terms of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American intellectual and religious life. It also analyzes Wharton in terms of her gender and class, explaining how this aristocratic woman applies and yet transforms both the classical and Christian traditions that she inherits.

Focusing on key works of late-nineteenth and early- twentieth-century American literary realism, Phillip Barrish traces the emergence of new ways of gaining intellectual prestige--that is, new ways of gaining some degree of cultural recognition. Through extended readings of works by Henry James, William Dean Howells, Abraham Cahan, and Edith Wharton, Barrish emphasizes the differences between realist modes of cultural authority and those associated with the rise of the social sciences.