Cyrus R. K. Patell 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 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.

New York holds a special place in America's national mythology as both the gateway to the USA and as a diverse, vibrant cultural center distinct from the rest of the nation. From the international atmosphere of the Dutch colony New Amsterdam, through the expansion of the city in the nineteenth century, to its unique appeal to artists and writers in the twentieth, New York has given its writers a unique perspective on American culture. This Companion explores the range of writing and performance in the city, celebrating Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, Eugene O'Neill, and Allen Ginsberg among a host of authors who have contributed to the city's rich literary and cultural history. Illustrated and featuring a chronology and guide to further reading, this book is the ideal guide for students of American literature as well as for all who love New York and its writers.