Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> American - General

Gary Snyder (b. 1930) is one of the most distinguished American poets, remarkable both for his long and productive career and for his equal contributions to literature and environmental thought. His childhood in the Pacific Northwest profoundly shaped his sensibility due to his contact with Native American culture and his early awareness of the destruction of the environment by corporations. Although he emerged from the San Francisco Renaissance with writers such as Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, and William Everson, he became associated with the Beats due to his friendships with Allen...

Owen W. Gilman Jr. stresses the US experience of war in the twenty-first century and argues that wherever and whenever there is war, there will be imaginative responses to it,

especially the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Since the trauma of September 11, the experience of Americans at war has been rendered honestly and fully in a wide range of texts--creative nonfiction and journalism, film, poetry, and fiction. These responses, Gilman contends, have packed a lot of power and measure up even to World War II's literature and film.

Like few other books, Gilman's volume...

On the Duty of Civil Disobedience is an essay by American author Henry David Thoreau and was first published in 1849 with the title of Resistance to Civil Government.  Thoreau sets for an argument that permit governments to rule or degrade their consciences, otherwise the government forces one to become an agent of injustice.  Thoreau was motivated by his opposition to slavery and with the Mexican–American War (1846–1848).

"What I feel most moved to write, that is banned, -- it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot." Herman Melville wrote these words as he struggled to survive as a failing novelist. Between 1853 and 1856, he did write "the other way," working exclusively for magazines. He earned more money from his stories than from the combined sales of his most well known novels, Moby-Dick, Pierre, and The Confidence-Man.

In Herman Melville Graham Thompson examines the author's magazine work in its original publication context, including stories that became classics, such as...