Brief History of American Literature (eBook)

Richard Gray is Professor of Literature at the University of Essex and former Distinguished Visiting Professor at a number of universities in the United States. He is the first specialist in American literature to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy and has published over a dozen books on the topic, including the award-winning Writing the South (Ideas of an American Region (1986) and The Life of William Faulkner: A Critical Biography (1944). His History of American Literature is widely considered to be one of the standard works on the subject.

Preface and Acknowledgments ix

1 The First Americans: American Literature During the Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 1

Imagining Eden 1

Writing of the Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 1

2 Inventing Americas: The Making of American Literature 1800-1865 47

Making a Nation 47

The Making of American Myths 47

The Making of American Selves 59

The Making of Many Americas 71

The Making of an American Fiction and Poetry 90

3 Reconstructing the Past, Reimagining the Future: The Development of American Literature 1865-1900 115

Rebuilding a Nation 115

The Development of Literary Regionalisms 115

The Development of Literary Realism and Naturalism 130

The Development of Women's Writing 143

The Development of Many Americas 148

4 Making It New: The Emergence of Modern American Literature 1900-1945 159

Changing National Identities 159

Between Victorianism and Modernism 159

The Inventions of Modernism 176

Traditionalism, Politics, and Prophecy 211

Community and Identity 226

Mass Culture and the Writer 242

5 Negotiating the American Century: American Literature since 1945 249

Towards a Transnational Nation 249

Formalists and Confessionals 249

Public and Private Histories 263

Beats, Prophets, and Aesthetes 281

The Art and Politics of Race 296

Realism and Its Discontents 314

Language and Genre 328

Creating New Americas 345

Index 373

"This is a wonderful book. Writing in an elegantly accessible
style, Richard Gray offers the reader a truly comprehensive
narrative of American literature from the seventeenth to the
twenty-first centuries. The entire range, diversity, and richness
of American writing are made available here in a single, superbly
authoritative volume."

--Andrew Hook, University of Glasgow

"Drawing upon a lifetime of reading and research in this field,
and covering a huge range of material from the Bay Psalm
Book to Walter Mosley, Richard Gray's Literature of the
United States offers an excellent survey that holds the
American cultural tradition in a compelling, synoptic whole."

--Paul Giles, University of Sydney

"Richard Gray's A Brief History of American Literature is
an extraordinary achievement. Gray offers us a fascinating and
nuanced overview of United States writing, employing literary
sensibility to examine a range of periods and genres."

--Susan Castillo, King's College, London