"A History of Californian Literature surveys the paradoxical image of the Golden State as a site of dreams and disenchantment, formidable beginnings and ruinous ends. This History encompasses the prismatic nature of California by exploring a variety of historical periods, literary genres, and cultural movements affecting the state's development, from the colonial era to the twenty-first century. Written by a host of leading historians and literary critics, this book offers readers insight into the tensions and contradictions that have shaped the literary landscape of California and also American literature generally"--

Blake Allmendinger's A History of California Literature surveys the paradoxical image of the Golden State as a site of dreams and disenchantment, formidable beginnings and ruinous ends. This history encompasses the prismatic nature of California by exploring a variety of historical periods, literary genres, and cultural movements affecting the state's development, from the colonial era to the twenty-first century. Written by a host of leading historians and literary critics, this book offers readers insight into the tensions and contradictions that have shaped the literary landscape of California and also American literature generally.

This text is the first volume of a comprehensive anthology of Californian literature. It is divided into four parts and contains material ranging from Native American origin myths to Hollywood novels dissecting the American dream.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1950.

“A Native American rejoinder to Richard White and Jesse Amble White’s California Exposures.”—Kirkus Reviews Rewriting the history of California as Indigenous. Before there was such a thing as “California,” there were the People and the Land. Manifest Destiny, the Gold Rush, and settler colonial society drew maps, displaced Indigenous People, and reshaped the land, but they did not make California. Rather, the lives and legacies of the people native to the land shaped the creation of California. We Are the Land is the first and most comprehensive text of its kind, centering the long history of California around the lives and legacies of the Indigenous people who shaped it. Beginning with the ethnogenesis of California Indians, We Are the Land recounts the centrality of the Native presence from before European colonization through statehood—paying particularly close attention to the persistence and activism of California Indians in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The book deftly contextualizes the first encounters with Europeans, Spanish missions, Mexican secularization, the devastation of the Gold Rush and statehood, genocide, efforts to reclaim land, and the organization and activism for sovereignty that built today’s casino economy. A text designed to fill the glaring need for an accessible overview of California Indian history, We Are the Land will be a core resource in a variety of classroom settings, as well as for casual readers and policymakers interested in a history that centers the native experience.