A History of American Literature - Blackwell History of Literature

"Richard Gray's real achievement is somehow to have compressed more than 400 years of thrillingly rich literary history between two covers." Literary Review

"Highly readable, jargon-free, and engaging." American Literary Scholarship

¡°This book is the first comprehensive, single volume history of American literature since The Columbia Literary History of the United States edited by Elliott Emory and published sixteen years ago. It is a puzzle, given the extraordinary interest in American literature at home and abroad, that so few full histories of American literature have been published. Consider the fact that the Columbia history arrived nearly four decades after R. E. Spiller¡¯s Literary History of the United States. What makes Gray¡¯s book so extraordinary is that it supercedes the Spiller and Emory texts in nearly every respect, and even challenges the supremacy of the titanic (this pun is intentional), multi-volume, still-evolving Cambridge History of American Literature. How Gray managed to so captivatingly capture the depth and breadth of so complex a literature in under a thousand pages is worth considering. [¡­] Richard Gray possesses the most balanced scholarship of the entire range of American literature I ever read. [¡­] This is the first history of American literature fully worthy of the multi-dimensionality of its subject.¡± Norman Weinstein, Boise State University

"Richard Gray's real achievement is somehow to have compressed more than 400 years of thrillingly rich literary history between two covers." Literary Review "Highly readable, jargon-free, and engaging." American Literary Scholarship "This book is the first comprehensive, single volume history of American literature since The Columbia Literary History of the United States edited by Elliott Emory and published sixteen years ago. It is a puzzle, given the extraordinary interest in American literature at home and abroad, that so few full histories of American literature have been published. Consider the fact that the Columbia history arrived nearly four decades after R. E. Spiller's Literary History of the United States. What makes Gray's book so extraordinary is that it supercedes the Spiller and Emory texts in nearly every respect, and even challenges the supremacy of the titanic (this pun is intentional), multi-volume, still-evolving Cambridge History of American Literature. How Gray managed to so captivatingly capture the depth and breadth of so complex a literature in under a thousand pages is worth considering. [...] Richard Gray possesses the most balanced scholarship of the entire range of American literature I ever read. [...] This is the first history of American literature fully worthy of the multi-dimensionality of its subject." Norman Weinstein, Boise State University --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Description
This major new history of American literature from pre-Columbian times to the present is written in an informed but accessible style by one of the leading authorities in the field. While paying attention to the full range of fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction that has been incorporated into the mainstream literary canon, it also looks at other forms, including oral literature, folktales, spirituals, the blues, the western, the detective story, the thriller, and science fiction. All this writing is placed in the context of American social and cultural history both before and after the formation of the United States.

Taking account of the radical changes that have occurred in our understanding of American literature over the past 30 years, this book concentrates above all on the plural character of culture in the United States, the conflicting forces at work in its history, and the continuing acts of imagination that constitute the making of this nation.

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