In this book, David Wyatt examines the mythology of California as it is reflected in the literature of the region. He argues that the encounter with landscape played an important role in literature of the West, and distinguishes this particular characteristic from the literatures of other American regions. Wyatt discusses in depth the writings of Dana, Leonard, Fremont, Muir, King, Austin, Norris, Steinbeck, and Chandler, Jeffers and Snyder and their literary reactions to the landscape. By examining the changing role of the landscape in literature of California, the book sheds new light on an...

In Cross Examinations of Law and Literature Brook Thomas uses legal thought and legal practice as a lens through which to read some of the important fictions of antebellum America. The lens reflects both ways, and we learn as much about the literature in the context of contemporary legal concerns as we do about the legal ideologies that the fiction subverts or reveals. Successive chapters deal with Cooper's Pioneers and Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables (property law and the image of the judiciary), Melville's "Benito Cereno" and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (slavery), Melville's White...

H.D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines concerns a prominent aspect of the writing of the modern American poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle): a career-long engagement with hellenic literature, mythology, and art. Eileen Gregory's exhaustive treatment of H.D.'s poetic engagement with Greece is one of the few studies of a modern poet in relation to hellenism. She explores at length H.D.'s intertextual engagement with specific classic writers, and catalogues classical allusions in H.D.'s lyric poetry.

By offering a fresh look at Bishop criticism that has moved from purely formal concerns and postmodern interpretations to more recent feminist analysis, Victoria Harrison traces Bishop's career, dividing Bishop's work into three chronological periods of activity: her early work, her writing in Brazil, and her late retrospective verse. By examining letters and notebooks, Harrison unfolds the biographical events that influenced Bishop's poetic style, addressing her treatment of such topics as family relations, history, politics, war, love, sexuality, and ethnic differences. Elizabeth Bishop's...

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...

The Culture and Commerce of the Short Story is a cultural and historical account of the birth and development of the American short story from the time of Poe.

In a highly original study, David Wyatt takes a broad, yet personal, look at the cultural legacy of the sixties through ten creative figures who came of age during the Vietnam War. Wyatt argues that it is each artist's "personal engagement" with his or her own era that binds together the achievements of storytellers such as filmmaker George Lucas, songwriter Bruce Springsteen, playwright Sam Shepard, journalist Michael Herr, writers Ann Beattie, Alice Walker, Ethan Mordden, Sue Miller, and poets Gregory Orr, and Louise Gluck. For some their work is marked by the war and concerned directly...

The creation of an American national culture in the nineteenth century coincided with a common belief that the emerging nation was diseased and in need of healing. Reading nineteenth-century narratives of health by a wide variety of authors, Burbick exposes the fears and conflicts underlying the creation of an American national culture. In studying these narratives of the body, this pioneering and comprehensive work concludes that a fundamental uneasiness about democracy may result in a collective, willful effort to control the body trope as a means of composing social order.

Reimagining Thoreau synthesizes the interests of the intellectual and psychological biographer and the literary critic in a reconsideration of Thoreau's literary career. The aims of the book are, first, to situate Thoreau's aims and achievements as a writer within the context of his troubled relationship to the microcosm of antebellum Concord; second, to reinterpret Walden as a temporally layered text in light of the successive drafts of the book and the evidence of Thoreau's journals and contemporaneous writings; and third, to overturn traditional views of Thoreau's "decline" by offering a...