This work presents a collection of prefaces, reviews and articles by Americans on American and European fiction. It draws on such periodicals as the Atlantic Monthly, the Nation, and Galaxy, as well as many of the lesser-known journals and magazines of the period. Charted in these three volumes, which span the period from 1776 to 1900, is the movement from anxious defences of the novel as a necessary vehicle of truth and morality to the fully-fledged theoretical exfoliations of Thomas Sergeant Perry, George W. Lathrop, Henry James, and others.

The American theorists: Henry James, Lionel Trilling and Wayne C. Booth have revolutionized our understanding of narrative and have each championed the novel as an art form. Concepts from their work have become part of the fabric of novel criticism today, influencing theorists, authors and readers alike.

Emphasizing the crucial relationship between the works of these three critics, Peter Rawlings explores their understanding of the novel form, and investigates their ideas on:

• realism and representation
• authors and narration
• point of view and...

This book explores landmark criticism on a writer who continues to command critical attention. In addition to mapping out the existing critical terrain, these essays offer a sense of future trajectories in James studies. Essays consider James' own criticism and theories of narrative and architecture, James' letters, money and globalization.

A collection of prefaces, reviews and articles by Americans on American and European fiction. Charted in these three volumes, which span 1776 to 1900, is the movement from anxious defences of the novel as a necessary vehicle of truth and morality to fully-fledged theoretical exfoliations.

A collection of prefaces, reviews and articles by Americans on American and European fiction. Charted in these three volumes, which span 1776 to 1900, is the movement from anxious defences of the novel as a necessary vehicle of truth and morality to fully-fledged theoretical exfoliations.

Published in 1999. Shakespeare is `the great author of America' declared James Fenimore Cooper in 1828. The ambiguous resonance of this claim is fully borne out in this collection of writings on Shakespeare by over forty prominent Americans, spanning the period between the War of independence and the outbreak of the First World War. Featured writers include: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. The essays, many of which are reprinted here for the first time, are arranged in chronological order and...