Many critics have noticed the paradoxes and contradictions in the work of William Carlos Williams but few have analyzed them in detail. Professor Ahearn argues that Williams criticism has not gone far enough in recognizing the uses Williams saw for contradiction. He contends that Williams began to acquire his own voice as a poet when he recognized that he could be a vehicle for contending voices. His reading departs from previous examinations of the early poetry in the emphasis it places on the poems as expressions of Williams' social position. We find a Williams whose contribution to...

Novel Arguments deals with American innovative (postmodern, metafictional, experimental) fiction since the sixties. It advances a concept of the "argument" of fiction to correct criticism's too purely formal interest in innovation. The book closely examines the readings of five important innovative novels by Donald Barthelme, Ishmael Reed, Robert Coover, Walter Abish, and Kathy Acker and shows how they achieve an effective articulation of their concerns by virtue of their innovation, which is aimed at a making new of fictional cognition.

Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem is a critical and historical interpretation of "Oriental" influences on American modernist poetry. Kern equates Fenollosa and Pound's "discovery" of Chinese writing with the American pursuit of a natural language for poetry, what Emerson had termed the "language of nature." Through analysis and contextualization, Kern sheds light on the three contemporary nexuses of his search: the cultural study of Orientalism and the West, the evolution of Indo-European linguistic theory, and the intellectual tradition of American modernist poetry.

Mark Twain was an author both drawn to and suspicious of authority, and his novels reflect this tension. Marked by disruptions, repetitions, and contradictions, they exemplify the ideological standoff between the American ideal of individual freedom and the reality of social control. This book provides a fresh look at Twain's major novels such as Life on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. The difficulties in these works are shown to be neither flaws nor failures, but rather intrinsic to both the structure of the American novel and the texture...

In this major new study of Henry James' classic text of cultural criticism, The American Scene, Beverly Haviland shows how James confronted the vexing problem of making sense of the past so that he could make culture work. In this record of his 1904-5 return to America and in his unfinished novels, The Sense of the Past and The Ivory Tower, he interpreted the social conflicts that seemed to be paralyzing relations between men and women, between black and white Americans, between "natives" and "aliens," between defenders of taste and censors of waste. Haviland's own method brings historical...

Partisans and Poets explores the popular poetries that interacted with American political culture during World War I. Van Wienen describes how poetry in mainstream newspapers and major-press anthologies bolstered dominant, nationalist ideologies, and demonstrates how pacifist and socialist verse mobilized minority groups contending for hegemonic power. While recovering the work of many forgotten modern poets, Partisans and Poets asserts that wartime poetry engaged in complex negotiations with specific and often dangerous political and historical circumstances.

Linking classic American literature to contemporary popular culture, Sublime Enjoyment argues that the rational systems of normal social life are motivated and sustained by "perverse" desires. This perversity arises from the failure of symbolic satisfaction--love, work, success--to make us happy, and from our refusal to accept that failure. Examining the ways in which this inadvertence is represented in American literature and culture, Dennis Foster identifies ways that longings are linked to social forces.

In Poe and the Printed Word Kevin Hayes reappraises the work of Edgar Allan Poe in the context of nineteenth-century print culture. Hayes examines how publishing opportunities of the time shaped Poe's development as a writer and explores the different methods of publication he employed as a showcase for his verse, criticism and fiction. Beginning with Poe's early exposure to the printed word, and ending with the ambitious magazine and book projects of his final years, this study is part biography, part literary history and part history of the book.

Gregg Crane examines the interaction between civic identity and race and justice within American law and literature in this study. He recounts the efforts of literary and legal figures to bring the nation's law in accord with the moral consensus that slavery and racial oppression are evil. Covering such writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass, and a range of novelists, poets, philosophers, politicians, lawyers and judges, this original book will revise the relationship between race and nationalism in American literature.

John McWilliams' book is an ambitious attempt to review New England history and literature from the Puritans through the Revolutionary period to the antebellum era. McWilliams demonstrates how successive narratives of crises, real or imagined, reflected historical realities which proved adaptable to later settlers. Offering an all-encompassing narrative of one crucial region in the American literary and historical experience, he brings to light new contexts for understanding crucial events in early American literature and history.