David Halliburton's book is a richly textured study of the complete writings of Stephen Crane, including Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, The Red Badge of Courage, and the less well-known fiction, newswriting, and poetry. Offering close readings of the works within a broad framework, Halliburton sets out to explore the imaginative world Crane created in his total uvre of fiction, poetry and reportage. Comparative and interdisciplinary methods, combined with insights from historians such as Toynbee and Hofsteader, enable Halliburton to shed light on a number of issues. These include Crane's...

Throughout its history, America has been the scene of multiple encounters between communities speaking different languages. Literature has long sought to represent these encounters in various ways, from James Fenimore Cooper s frontier fictions to the Jewish-American writers who popularised Yiddish as a highly influential modern vernacular. While other studies have concentrated on isolated parts of this history, Lawrence Rosenwald s book is the first to consider the whole story of linguistic representation in American literature, and to consider as well how multilingual fictions can be...

Fictions of Capital situates manners and writing about manners in the context of American capitalism between 1880 and 1960, a period that runs from the onset of the sales culture to its war-prompted crisis point in the 1960s. The work of various economic theorists and historians is used to establish two of capitalism's deeper narratives: the plot to accumulate and expand resources (1880 to the First World War), and the plot to ensure reproduction of the expanded resources (preoccupying late capitalism, but already an issue for market leaders in the 1920s). James and Fitzgerald are read as the...

Throughout its history, America has been the scene of multiple encounters between communities speaking different languages. Literature has long sought to represent these encounters in various ways, from James Fenimore Cooper s frontier fictions to the Jewish-American writers who popularised Yiddish as a highly influential modern vernacular. While other studies have concentrated on isolated parts of this history, Lawrence Rosenwald s book is the first to consider the whole story of linguistic representation in American literature, and to consider as well how multilingual fictions can be...

This book attempts an interpretation of Revolutionary American culture. It argues that the cultural identity of the United States, like its political identity, emerged from a quarrel with the Old World. Europeans believed that the Revolution had 'turned the world upside down'. American intellectuals tried to construct a republic which refuted European criticism. They failed, but in failing they created an attitude to the terrain which became a central theme in American culture. The book employs the methods of perceptual geography and close textual analysis to examine images of the terrain and...

The theme of inequality has often dominated academic criticism, which has been concerned with identifying, analyzing, and demystifying various regimes of power and the illicit hierarchies upon which they are built. Studies of the United States in the nineteenth century have followed this trend in focusing on slavery, women's writing, and working-class activism. Kerry Larson advocates the importance of looking instead at equality as a central theme, viewing it not as an endangered ideal to strive for and protect but as an imagined social reality in its own right, one with far-reaching...

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...

Disjunctive Poetics examines some of the most interesting and experimental contemporary writers whose work forms a counterpoint to the mainstream writing of our time. Peter Quartermain suggests that the explosion of noncanonical modern writing is linked to the severe political, social, and economic dislocation of non-English-speaking immigrants who, bringing alternative culture with them as they passed through Ellis Island in their hundreds of thousands at the turn of the century, found themselves uprooted from their tradition and disassociated from their culture. The line of American poetry...

Robinson discusses each of Emerson's major later works noting their increasing orientation to a philosophy of the 'conduct of life'.

This book is a reassessment of the poetic achievement of William Carlos Williams in the light of the influence of such visual arts movements as Cubism, Dada, Futurism and Precisionism. The author argues that Williams essentially developed his concept of the modern poem by adopting the revolutionary ideas propagated by painters and theoreticians in the wake of Cezanne and the postimpressionists. A series of detailed interpretations of Williams' poems, embedded in the context of modern art in general, provides us with fresh insight into the work of one of the most important American poets of...