Descripciones mejoradas de Syndetics:

For the first time in four decades, there exists an authoritative and up-to-date survey of the literature of the United States, from prehistoric cave narratives to the radical movements of the sixties and the experimentation of the eighties.

This comprehensive volume--one of the century's most important books in American studies--extensively treats Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, Hemingway, and other long-cherished writers, while also giving considerable attention to recently discovered writers such as Kate Chopin and to literary movements and forms of writing not studied amply in the past. Informed by the most current critical and theoretical ideas, it sets forth a generation's interpretation of the rise of American civilization and culture.

The Columbia Literary History of the United States contains essays by today's foremost scholars and critics, overseen by a board of distinguished editors headed by Emory Elliott of Princeton University. These contributors reexamine in contemporary terms traditional subjects such as the importance of Puritanism, Romanticism, and frontier humor in American life and writing, but they also fully explore themes and materials that have only begun to receive deserved attention in the last two decades. Among these are the role of women as writers, readers, and literary subjects and the impact of writers from minority groups, both inside and outside the literary establishment.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Preface
• General Introduction
• Note on the Text
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1 Beginnings to 1810
• Associate Editor
• I A Key into the Languages of America
• The Native Voice
• The Literature of Discovery and Exploration
• English Literature at the American Moment
• The Puritan Vision of the New World
• II The Prose and Poetry of Colonial America
• History and Chronicle
• Sermons and Theological Writings
• Biography and Autobiography
• The Poetry of Colonial America
• III America in Transition
• From Cotton Mather to Benjamin Franklin
• Jonathan Edwards, Charles Chauncy, and the Great Awakening
• Thomas Jefferson and the Writing of the South
• IV The Literature of the New Republic
• The American Revolution as a Literary Event
• Poetry in the Early Republic
• Charles Brockden Brown and Early American Fiction
• Toward a National Literature
• Part 2 1810-1865
• Associate Editor
• I The Age in Perspective
• Idealism and Independence
• II Cultural Diversity and Literary Forms
• Washington Irving and the Knickerbocker Group
• James Fenimore Cooper and the Writers of the Frontier
• Edgar Allan Poe and the Writers of the Old South
• William Cullen Bryant and the Fireside Poets
• The Rise of the Woman Author
• Forms of Regional Humor
• A New Nation's Drama
• III Intellectual Movements and Social Change
• Social Discourse and Nonfictional Prose
• The Transcendentalists
• IV The American Renaissance
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Henry David Thoreau
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Herman Melville
• Walt Whitman
• Part 3 1865-1910
• Associate Editor
• I Signs of the Times
• Literature and Culture
• Culture and Consciousness
• II Genre Deliberations
• Realism and Regionalism
• Naturalism and the Languages of Determinism
• III Literary Diversities
• Literature for the Populace
• Immigrants and Other Americans
• Women Writers and the New Woman
• IV Major Voices
• Emily Dickinson
• Mark Twain
• Henry Adams
• Henry James
• Part 4 1910-1945
• Associate Editor
• I Contexts and Backgrounds
• The Emergence of Modernism
• Intellectual Life and Public Discourse
• Literary Scenes and Literary Movements
• II Regionalism, Ethnicity, and Gender: Comparative Literary Cultures
• Regionalism: A Diminished Thing
• Afro-American Literature
• Mexican American Literature
• Asian American Literature
• Women Writers Between the Wars
• III Fiction
• The Diversity of American Fiction
• Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein
• William Faulkner
• IV Poetry and Criticism
• The Diversity of American Poetry
• Robert Frost
• Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
• William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens
• Literary Criticism
• Part 5 1945 to the Present
• Associate Editor
• I The Postwar Era
• Culture, Power, and Society
• The New Philosophy
• Literature as Radical Statement
• II Forms and Genres
• Poetry Twentieth-Century Drama
• Neorealist Fiction
• Self-Reflexive Fiction
• III The Present
• The Fictions of the Present
• The Avante-Garde and Experimental Writing
• Notes on Contributors
• Index

Reseñas proporcionadas por Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Given the publisher's prestige and the numerous contributors, most libraries will regard this new literary history as a necessary purchase. And it probably is necessary. One regrets, however, certain editorial decisions. For example, there is no bibliography other than what is found in the essays themselves; in precision and number, these citations are not what one would expect of such histories. The decision to represent a ``variety of viewpoints'' and to permit ``considerable variation in approach, tone, and style'' caused huge variations in the value of the various essays. Most are standard scholarly fare, but some are simply too personal and subjective. This new history will replace Spiller's 40-year-old Literary History of the United States , since Spiller does not reflect new critical emphases that have emerged in the past 20 years. Peter Dollard, Alma Coll. Lib., Mich. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

This book invites comparison to the 1948 Literary History of the United States both because of the repetition of the name and because the editor, Emory Elliott, invites us to do so in the preface. It does well by the comparison, even though this study is different in important ways. The earlier book by Robert E. Spiller and friends-a classic, of course, and still useful-formed a unified, single statement, which produced a particular view of American literature and influenced generations of teachers. That is not possible for this study, nor should it be. Two facts of American literary studies over the past 40 years have been the diversity of critical theory and the opening of the canon to a variety of voices. Elliott and his editors, therefore, wisely decided to drop any attempt at a single view of American literature and to allow each contributor to express his or her view of a particular author or topic. The result is less a coherent history (that is not possible today) than a collection of essays covering the many facets of our literature and offering current interpretation of our authors and ideas (and that is as it must be). The writing is consistently fine; the views are often provocative. Indispensable to all libraries.-A.L. Ford, Lebanon Valley College

Booklist Review

From distinguished American university presses come two new literary histories that offer individual distinctions beyond their undeniable currency as the latest word on literary reputation and scholarship. From native American cave narratives to punk princess Kathy Acker, the Columbia Literary History of the United States certainly covers the waterfront in breadth if not always in depth. Editor Emory Elliott's liberal definition of art and literature is sure to offend some traditionalists, but it has the virtue of drawing every conceivable kind of work, as well as a few that border on the inconceivable, under a single umbrella. The range of contributors and their varying viewpoints helps to bring order as literary genres are chronicled, trends assessed, and critical perspectives advanced in this lively, current, essential, and debatable account of the country's literary heritage. Index. Fowler is a more conventional literary historian, but then the limitations, chronological and critical, that he has imposed on his subject are themselves circumscribed by more orthodox boundaries. Time-wise, Fowler's account begins with the Middle Ages and continues through postmodern expression of the 1970s and 1980s. Critically, he tends to explore literary developments by focusing on the changes and advances that individual writers created within each form. Minireadings of specific texts form the basis for his overall judgments and lead to a number of interesting comparisons, particularly when the author is matching enduring literary stars with writers whose reputations have waxed and waned. In light of current trends, Fowler also spotlights the contributions of a number of women authors who were previously neglected. A judicious and careful rethinking of the literary canon. Index. JB.