Western culture is composed of a subtle and complex mixture of influences: religious, philosophical, linguistic, political, social, and sociological. American culture is a particular strain, but unless European antecedents and contemporary leanings are duly noted, any resulting history is predestined to provincialism and distortion. In his account of American literature during the period 1919 to 1932, McCormick deals with the extraordinary work of artists who wrested imaginative order from a world in which the abyss was never out of sight.McCormick's volume is intended as a critical, rather than encyclopedic history of literature on both sides of the Atlantic between the end of World War I and the political and social crises that arose in the 1930s. Although he emphasizes American writers, the emergence of a vital and distinctly modern American literature is located in the cultural encounter with Europe and the rejection of national bias by the major figures of the period.McCormick deals with Gertrude Stein and the mythology of the "lost generation," the tensions and ambivalences of traditionalism and modernity in the work of Sherwood Anderson and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the effect and qualities of Hemingway's style as compared to that of Henry de Montherlant, and the provincial iconoclasm of Sinclair Lewis juxtaposed with the more telling satire of Italo Svevo. The formal innovations in the work of John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, and William Faulkner, the poetic revolution against cultural parochialism and genteel romanticism is given extensive consideration with regard to the work of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore are also discussed. The concluding chapters discuss literary and social criticism and assess the influence of psychoanalysis, philosophical pragmatism, and radical historiography on the intellectual climate of the period.Teachers and students in English and American Literature, American History, and Comparative Literature, and the general reader interested in the writing of the period, may gain new insights from these valuations, devaluations, and re-evaluations.

Western culture is composed of a subtle and complex mixture of influences: religious, philosophical, linguistic, political, social, and sociological. American culture is a particular strain, but unless European antecedents and contemporary leanings are duly noted, any resulting history is predestined to provincialism and distortion. In his account of American literature during the period 1919 to 1932, McCormick deals with the extraordinary work of artists who wrested imaginative order from a world in which the abyss was never out of sight. McCormick's volume is intended as a critical, rather than encyclopedic history of literature on both sides of the Atlantic between the end of World War I and the political and social crises that arose in the 1930s. Although he emphasizes American writers, the emergence of a vital and distinctly modern American literature is located in the cultural encounter with Europe and the rejection of national bias by the major figures of the period. McCormick deals with Gertrude Stein and the mythology of the "lost generation," the tensions and ambivalences of traditionalism and modernity in the work of Sherwood Anderson and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the effect and qualities of Hemingway's style as compared to that of Henry de Montherlant, and the provincial iconoclasm of Sinclair Lewis juxtaposed with the more telling satire of Italo Svevo. The formal innovations in the work of John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, and William Faulkner, the poetic revolution against cultural parochialism and genteel romanticism is given extensive consideration with regard to the work of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore are also discussed. The concluding chapters discuss literary and social criticism and assess the influence of psychoanalysis, philosophical pragmatism, and radical historiography on the intellectual climate of the period. Teachers and students in English and American Literature, American History, and Comparative Literature, and the general reader interested in the writing of the period, may gain new insights from these valuations, devaluations, and re-evaluations. John McCormick is professor emeritus of comparative literature at Rutgers University and Honorary Fellow of English and Literature at the University of York. He is author of many books, including Catastrophe and Imagination, Fiction as Knowledge, and George Santayana: A Biography.

Political issues and events have always acted as a catalyst on thought and art. In this pioneering study, Larry J. Reynolds argues that the European revolutions of 1848-49 quickened the American literary imagination and shaped the characters, plots, and themes of the American renaissance. He traces the impact of the revolutions on Emerson, Fuller, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Thoreau, showing that the upheavals abroad both inspired and disturbed. Extraordinarily well informed and creative treatment of the influences of the 1848-49 European revolutions on writers of the American Renaissance...The book is especially effective in providing a historical context for reading major writings. It demonstrates influences at work at a number of levels and presents historical narrative and subtle readings of literary texts with equal clarity. Highly recommended.- Choice

Apples and Ashes offers the first literary history of the Civil War South. The product of extensive archival research, it tells an expansive story about a nation struggling to write itself into existence. Confederate literature was in intimate conversation with other contemporary literary cultures, especially those of the United States and Britain. Thus, Coleman Hutchison argues, it has profound implications for our understanding of American literary nationalism and the relationship between literature and nationalism more broadly. Apples and Ashes is organized by genre, with each chapter using a single text or a small set of texts to limn a broader aspect of Confederate literary culture. Hutchison discusses an understudied and diverse archive of literary texts including the literary criticism of Edgar Allan Poe; southern responses to Uncle Tom's Cabin; the novels of Augusta Jane Evans; Confederate popular poetry; the de facto Confederate national anthem, “Dixie”; and several postwar southern memoirs. In addition to emphasizing the centrality of slavery to the Confederate literary imagination, the book also considers a series of novel topics: the reprinting of European novels in the Confederate South, including Charles Dickens's Great Expectations and Victor Hugo's Les Misérables; Confederate propaganda in Europe; and postwar Confederate emigration to Latin America. In discussing literary criticism, fiction, poetry, popular song, and memoir, Apples and Ashes reminds us of Confederate literature's once-great expectations. Before their defeat and abjection—before apples turned to ashes in their mouths—many Confederates thought they were in the process of creating a nation and a national literature that would endure.

This book argues that the sudden decline of old rural vernaculars – such as French patois, Italian dialects, and the Irish language – caused these languages to become the objects of powerful longings and projections that were formative of modernist writing. Seán Ó Ríordáin in Ireland and Pier Paolo Pasolini in Italy reshaped minor languages to use as private idioms of poetry; the revivalist conception of Irish as a lost, perfect language deeply affected the work of James Joyce; the disappearing dialects of northern France seemed to Marcel Proust to offer an escape from time itself. Drawing on a broad range of linguistic and cultural examples to present a major reevaluation of the origins and meaning of European literary modernism, Barry McCrea shows how the vanishing languages of the European countryside influenced metropolitan literary culture in fundamental ways.

This work traces how Gothic imagination from the literature and culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and twentieth-century US and European film has impacted Latin American literature and film culture. Serrano argues that the Gothic has provided Latin American authors with a way to critique a number of issues, including colonization, authoritarianism, feudalism, and patriarchy. The book includes a literary history of the European Gothic to demonstrate how Latin American authors have incorporated its characteristics but also how they have broken away or inverted some elements, such as traditional plot lines, to suit their work and address a unique set of issues. The book examines both the modernistas of the nineteenth century and the avant-garde writers of the twentieth century, including Huidobro, Bombal, Rulfo, Roa Bastos, and Fuentes. Looking at the Gothic in Latin American literature and film, this book is a groundbreaking study that brings a fresh perspective to Latin American creative culture.

An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race—and promises to change the way we read American literature—from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison "reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." Her brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. Written with the artistic vision that has earned the Nobel Prize-winning author a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark is an invaluable read for avid Morrison admirers as well as students, critics, and scholars of American literature.