Sacvan Bercovitch Livres

This is the first complete narrative history of nineteenth-century American poetry. Barbara Packer explores the neoclassical and satiric forms mastered by the early Federalist poets; the creative reaches of once-celebrated, and still compelling, poets like Longfellow and Whittier; the distinctive lyric forms developed by Emerson and the Transcendentalists. Shira Wolosky provides a new perspective on the achievement of female poets of the period, as well as a close appreciation of African-American poets, including the collective folk authors of the Negro spirituals. She also illuminates the major works of the period, from Poe through Melville and Crane, to Whitman and Dickinson. The authors of this volume discuss this extraordinary literary achievement both in formal terms and in its sustained engagement with changing social and cultural conditions. In doing so they recover and elucidate American poetry of the nineteenth century for our twenty-first century pleasure, profit, and renewed study.

This is the most complete account to date of American poetry and literary criticism in the Modernist period. Andrew Dubois and Frank Lentricchia examine the work of Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens. Irene Ramalho Santos broadens the scope of the poetic scene through attention to a wide diversity of writers--with special emphasis on Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and Langston Hughes. William Cain traces the rise of an internationalist academic aesthetics and the process by which the study of a distinctive national literature was instituted.

Volume 6 of The Cambridge History of American Literature explores the emergence and flowering of modernism in the United States. David Minter provides a cultural history of the American novel from the 'lyric years' to World War I, through post-World War I disillusionment, to the consolidation of the Left in response to the mire of the Great Depression. Rafia Zafar tells the story of the Harlem Renaissance, detailing the artistic accomplishments of such diverse figures as Zora Neal Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and Richard Wright. Werner Sollors examines canonical texts as well as popular magazines and hitherto unknown immigrant writing from the period. Taken together these narratives cover the entire range of literary prose written in the first half of the twentieth century, offering a model of literary history for our times, focusing as they do on the intricate interplay between text and context.

Volume VII of the Cambridge History of American Literature examines a broad range of American literature of the past half-century, revealing complex relations to changes in society. Christopher Bigsby discusses American dramatists from Tennessee Williams to August Wilson, showing how innovations in theatre anticipated a world of emerging countercultures and provided America with an alternative view of contemporary life. Morris Dickstein describes the condition of rebellion in fiction from 1940 to 1970, linking writers as diverse as James Baldwin and John Updike. John Burt examines writers of the American South, describing the tensions between modernization and continued entanglements with the past. Wendy Steiner examines the postmodern fictions since 1970, and shows how the questioning of artistic assumptions has broadened the canon of American literature. Finally, Cyrus Patell highlights the voices of Native American, Asian American, Chicano, gay and lesbian writers, often marginalized but here discussed within and against a broad set of national traditions.

Volume 3 covers a pivotal era in the formation of American identity as well as a permanent multi-faceted literary culture in the United States. Four leading scholars connect the literature with the massive expansive historical changes then underway. The narratives of Richard Brodhead, Nancy Bentley, Walter Benn Michaels and Susan L. Mizruchi constitute a rich and detailed account of American literature and culture that began to embrace a wide spectrum of cultural outsiders as well as high literature through William Dean Howells and Henry James.

The narratives in this volume make for a four-fold perspective on literature: social, cultural, intellectual, and aesthetic; they constitute a basic reassessment of American prose-writing between 1820 and 1865. These narratives place the American literature in an international context, while never losing sight of its distinctive American characteristics, whether colonial, provincial, or national. Together, they offer a compelling and comprehensive revision of the literary importance of early American history and the historical value of early American literature.

IVolume 8, concerned with works of poetry and criticism written between 1940 and the present, brings together two different sets of materials and narrative forms: the aesthetic and the institutional. Discarding the traditional synoptic overview of major figures, von Hallberg, Graff, and Carton settle in favor of a history from the inside--a history of interstices and relations, equal to the task of considering the contexts of art, power, and criticism in which it is set.

This is a dazzling performance. It supplies conceptual links between phenomena where historians have often sensed a connection without being able to describe it adequately. . . [Bercovitch] has written intellectual history at the highest level. Edmund S. Morgan, New York Review of Books

Exploring themes of sin, guilt, and redemption, this enduring classic delves into the complexities of human morality and societal judgment. Set in Puritan New England, it follows Hester Prynne, who bears the shame of an illegitimate child marked by a scarlet letter. Through rich symbolism and character development, the narrative critiques the rigid moral codes of the time while offering profound insights into the nature of individuality and social conformity. Its relevance continues to resonate, making it a pivotal work in American literature.

Syntetická práce předního amerického literárního a kulturního historika židovského původu se zabývá vznikem a transformacemi Ameriky jako kulturního symbolu. Hlavním přínosem je vysvětlení proměny kalvinistického výkladu údělu člověka (predestinace ke spáse nebo k zatracení) v optimistický mileniální mýtus Severní Ameriky jako „zaslíbené země“ pro všechny přistěhovalce a dále transformace tohoto mýtu v politickou a historickou ideologii v době americké a Velké francouzské revoluce, vyúsťující později v přijetí tzv. kontinuální revoluce jako principu americké demokracie (v historiografii George Bancrofta a historii idejí Vernona Parringtona). Bercovitch ukazuje, že toto ideologické vyústění vývoje americké kulturní symboliky mělo značný vliv i na hodnocení americké literatury. Jeho cílem však není pouhá kritika ideologií amerikanismu. Ukazuje, že v americké kultuře existuje mezi uměním a ideologií dialog, který je základem americké kulturní identity.