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This book is about the relationship of the American writer to his land and language - to the 'scene' and the 'sign', to the natural landscape and the inscriptions imposed upon it by men.

This book is a study of the development of New England literature and literary institutions from the American Revolutionary era to the late nineteenth century. Professor Buell explores the foundations, growth and literary results of the professionalisation of the writing vocation.

Breitwieser suggests that the continuity between Mather and Franklin can illuminate the larger continuity between American Puritanism and the American Enlightenment and that certain abiding questions about American identity are raised clearly for the first time in the writings of these two brilliant founders of the national literature.

The San Francisco Renaissance is the first overview of this major American literary movement. Michael Davidson recounts its emergence during the postwar period in the San Francisco Bay area and then as it blossomed into the literary excitements associated with the Beat movement.

The Cliffs of Solitude offers a comprehensive assessment of the career of one of America's most neglected major poets, Robinson Jeffers.

Blanche H. Gelfant's book Cross-Cultural Reckonings both demonstrates and questions the applicability of postmodern cultural and literary theories to realistic texts - to fiction and autobiographies valued for their truth.

Poet's Prose is the first scholarly work devoted exclusively to American prose poetry and has been recognised as a pioneering study in contemporary American poetry. Three central works of American poets' prose are discussed in detail: William Carlos Williams' Kora in Hell, Robert Creeley's Presences, and John Ashbery's Three Poems.

The American West of myth and legend has always exerted a strong hold on the popular imagination, and Reading the West, first published in 1996, examines the basis of that fascination. These critical essays by writers, independent scholars and critics on the literature of the American West showcase new ways of reading and understanding western writing.

This study, first published in 1994, takes a broad, yet personal, look at the cultural legacy of the sixties through ten creative figures who came of age during the Vietnam War; filmmaker George Lucas, songwriter Bruce Springsteen, playwright Sam Shepard, journalist Michael Herr, writers Ann Beattie, Alice Walker, Ethan Mordden, Sue Miller, and poets Gregory Orr, and Louise Gluck.

Tracing the tradition of American historical fiction from its origins in the early 19th century to the eve of World War II, the author devotes most of his book to new readings of major texts by James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton and others.

The importance of Native American realism is traced through a study of the evolution of dramatic theory from the early 1890s through World War I and the uniquely American innovations in realistic drama between world wars.

Here, Rachel Blau Duplessis shows how, through poetic language, modernist writers represented the debates around such social issues of modernity as suffrage, sexuality, manhood, and African-American and Jewish subjectivities.

Examines the response of American leftist writers from the 1930s to the rise of mass culture, and to the continued propagation of the values of consumerism during the Depression. It traces in the work of Kenneth Fearing and Nathaniel West certain theoretical positions associated with the Frankfurt school (especially Walter Benjamin) and with contemporary theorists of postmodernism.

Through the voice of American fiction, Religion and Sexuality in American Literature examines the relations of body and spirit (religion and sexuality). Ann-Janine Morey examines novels dealing with the ministry as the medium wherein so many of the tensions of religion and sexuality are dramatised.

John McWilliams's 1990 book was the first thorough account of the many attempts to fashion an epic literature (the anxiously anticipated 'American Epic') from a wide range of potentially heroic New World subjects.

The Civil War stands vivid in the collective memory of the American public. There has always been a profound interest in the subject, and specifically the participation of black Americans in and reactions to the war and the war's outcome. Almost 200,000 African-American soldiers fought for the Union in the Civil War. Although most were illiterate ex-slaves, several thousand were well-educated, free black men from the northern states. The 176 letters in this collection were written by black soldiers in the Union army during the Civil War to black and abolitionist newspapers. They provide a unique expression of the black voice that was meant for a public forum. The letters tell of the men's experiences, their fears and their hopes. They describe in detail their army days - the excitement of combat and the drudgery of digging trenches. Some letters give vivid descriptions of battle; others protest against racism; still others call eloquently for civil rights. Many describe their conviction that they are fighting not only to free the slaves but to earn equal rights as citizens. These letters give an extraordinary picture of the war and also reveal the bright expectations, hopes, and ultimately the demands that black soldiers had for the future - for themselves and for their race. As first-person documents of the Civil War, the letters are strong statements of the American dream of justice and equality, and of the human spirit.

Many previous studies of Lowell have accounted for radical differences in his work by examining the poet's private life, but this collection of essays attempts to reassess his poetry and to restimulate critical thinking about it by focusing on his texts to raise new questions about the work.

In this broad ranging study, Gregg Crane examines the interaction between civic identity, race and justice in American law and literature. Covering such writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass, this is a remarkable book, that will revise the relationship between Race and Nationalism in American literature.

Drawing upon a wide variety of primary materials - historical narratives, paintings, dramatic renditions, fictional accounts - Tilton reflects on the ways in which the romantic and exceptional myth of Pocahontas was exploded, exploited, and ultimately made to rationalise dangerous preconceptions about the native American tradition.

This volume of essays brings together some of the best work by Americanists concerned with the problem of ideology and its bearing upon American literature and culture. The essays study theoretical issues, with questions of theme, genre, and perspective, and with interpretations of particular authors and texts.

Afrocentrism and its history has long been disputed and controversial. In this important book, Wilson Moses presents a critical and nuanced view of the issues. Tracing the origins of Afrocentrism since the eighteenth century, he examines the combination of various popular mythologies, some of them mystical and sentimental, others perfectly reasonable.

Focusing on key works of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literary realism, Phillip Barrish traces the emergence of new ways of gaining intellectual prestige - that is, new ways of gaining cultural recognition as unusually intelligent, sensitive or even wise.

Kevin Hayes reappraises Edgar Allan Poe's work in the context of nineteenth-century print culture. 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.

In this book, David Wyatt examines the mythology of California as it is reflected in the literature of the region. He argues that the encounter with landscape played an important role in literature of the West, and distinguishes this particular characteristic from the literatures of other American regions.

Harriet Jacobs, today perhaps the single-most read and studied black American woman of the nineteenth century, has not until recently enjoyed sustained, scholarly analysis. This anthology presents a far-ranging compendium of literary and cultural scholarship which will take its place as the primary resource for students and teachers.

Faulkner's Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns offers a reading of William Faulkner by viewing his masterpieces through the lens of current critical theory. The book addresses both the power of his work and the current theoretical issues that call that power into question.

The Culture and Commerce of the Short Story is a cultural and historical account of the birth and development of the American short story from the time of Poe. It describes how America - through political movements, changes in education, magazine editorial policy and the work of certain individuals - built the short story as an image of itself

Paul Giles describes how secular transformations of religious ideas have helped to shape the style and substance of works by American writers, filmmakers and artists from Catholic backgrounds such as Orestes Brownson, Theodore Dreiser, Mary McCarthy, Robert Mapplethorpe, Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Altman.

In this book Warren Motley offers an original interpretation of James Fenimore Cooper's career, examining Cooper's interest in the pioneer patriachs who built new societies in the wilderness. Throughout his life Cooper explored the problem of achieving a balance between freedom and authority. Here Motley traces his preoccupation with authority.

David Halliburton's book is a richly textured study of the complete writings of Stephen Crane. Offering close readings of the works within a broad framework, Halliburton sets out to explore the imaginative world Crane created in his total oeuvre of fiction, poetry and reportage.