Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> American - General

Native converts to Christianity, dubbed "praying Indians" by seventeenth-century English missionaries, have long been imagined as benign cultural intermediaries between English settlers and "savages." More recently, praying Indians have been dismissed as virtual inventions of the colonists: "good" Indians used to justify mistreatment of "bad" ones. In a new consideration of this religious encounter, Kristina Bross argues that colonists used depictions of praying Indians to create a vitally important role for themselves as messengers on an evangelical "errand into the wilderness" that...

-Since the earliest days, - writes Richard Chase in this classic study, -the American novel, in its most original and characteristic form, has worked out its destiny and defined itself by incorporating an element of romance.- In his detailed study of works by Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, Frank Norris, George Washington Cable, William Dean Howells, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, Chase identifies and traces this tradition through two centuries of American literature.

The best novelists, he...

Jacques Lacan's seminar on -The Purloined Letter- at once challenged literary theorists and revealed a radically new conception of psychoanalysis. His far-reaching claims about language and truth provoked a vigorous critique by Jacques Derrida, whose essay in turn has spawned further responses from Barbara Johnson, Jane Gallop, Irene Harvey, Norman Holland, and others.

The term American Renaissance designates a period in our nation's history when the literary -classics- appeared--works -original- enough to mark a beginning for America's literary history. But the American Renaissance, Donald Pease argues in his introduction, does not belong to the nation's secular history so much as it denotes a rebirth from it: -Independent of the time kept by secular history, the American Renaissance keeps what we could call global Renaissance time--the sacred time a nation claims to renew, when it claims its cultural place as a great nation existing within a...

-The problem of Poe's place in American culture cannot be settled canonically, since, unlike the works of Melville or Hawthorne, Poe's texts have not been primarily transmitted through the schools. Indeed, at its most radical level, the failure of criticism to account for the remarkable diversity of Poe's influence leads one to question the utility of the canon itself as an instrument for the study of American culture.---from the Introduction

The contributors to this volume share the conviction that Poe is central to current work on American culture--and that strictly theoretical...

In this groundbreaking book Charles Scruggs identifies the black urban experience as a driving force behind the twentieth-century Afro-American novel, resulting in a rich fictional tradition that runs from Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods through Toni Morrison's Beloved.

Scruggs begins by discussing the treatment of the Great Migration to the city in Afro-American writing from W. E. B. DuBois and Dunbar through the Harlem writers, establishing both the continuities and breaks between that tradition and that of the writers coming after the Depression. He...

Locating American Studies is a collection of seventeen essays first printed in American Quarterly, the journal of the American Studies Association. To mark the Association's celebration of its 50th anniversary in 1998, Lucy Maddox has brought together works by a distinguished group of scholars which "provide a useful window into the history and the evolution of the practice of American studies from its early, formational days to the present." Each essay, originally published between 1950 and 1996, is accompanied by a commentary in which a scholar from a related field...

Observers from Alexis de Tocqueville to Lionel Trilling have found the United States wanting in what it takes to produce a novelist of manners--namely, a rich enough past and sufficiently stratified classes. In a work that recovers the broader meaning of -manners- for past generations, Susan Goodman demonstrates that American writers have consistently tied the subject of national identity to the norms and behaviors of everyday life--that, in fact, the novel of manners is a dominant form of American fiction.

Goodman concentrates on a cluster of writers--William Dean Howells, Henry...

In colonial America, tales about the capture of English settlers by Native American war parties and the captives' subsequent suffering and privations were wildly popular among readers. Despite their importance in the development of American literature, however, the origins of the captivity narrative have until now been largely unexplored.

In Providence Tales and the Birth of American Literature, James Hartman uncovers the genesis of the captivity narrative in the English providence tale and its transformation in the seventeenth century. Exploring the cultural context in which...

William Faulkner occupied a unique position as a modern writer. Although famous for his modernist novels and their notorious difficulty, he also wrote extensively for the -culture industry, - and the works he produced for it--including short stories, adaptations, and screenplays--bore many of the hallmarks of consumer art. His experiences as a Hollywood screenwriter influenced him in a number of ways, many of them negative, while the films turned out by the -dream factories- in which he labored sporadically inspired both his interest and his contempt. Faulkner also disparaged the popular...

Securing the Commonwealth examines how eighteenth-century American writers understood the highly speculative financial times in which they lived. Spanning a century of cultural and literary life, this study shows how the era's literature commonly depicted an American ethos of risk taking and borrowing as the peculiar product of New World daring and the exigencies of revolution and nation building.

Some of the century's most important writers, including Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, Royall Tyler, Charles Brockden Brown, and Judith Sargent Murray, believed that economic...

In Hawthorne's Shyness, Clark Davis offers both a challenge to current trends in American literary studies and a striking new perspective on the writing of Nathaniel Hawthorne. He proposes an alternative to recent, ideologically driven criticism, including the range of approaches under the banner of New Historicism which continue to dominate the study of American literature. Drawing on ethical theorists including Heidegger, Levinas, Davidson, and Cavell, he finds new models for the relationship between critic and author in their philosophies of engagement with the Other. While these...

In Victory of Law, Deak Nabers examines developing ideas about the nature of law as reflected in literary and political writing before, during, and after the American Civil War. Nabers traces the evolution of antislavery thought from its pre-war opposition to the constitutional order of the young nation to its ultimate elevation of the U.S. Constitution as an expression of the ideal of justice--an ideal embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment.

Nabers shows how the intellectual history of the Fourteenth Amendment was rooted in literary sources--including Herman Melville's...