This volume brings together a group of essays on 27 English or American writers contributing to the history of English and American literature, and offers a concise survey of the question of literary understanding. It approaches this question in a specific and systematic way, adopting the framework of structuralist literary criticism. The book proposes a preliminary to the understanding of literature in general, a sort of “philosophy of literature”, as the problems involved in critical reading of course reflect the powerful characteristics of literary language.

An extensive collection of essays on English and American literature covering the works of many canonical authors. Bell offers deep insights into the themes, symbols, and literary techniques employed by these writers, making this book a must-read for literature enthusiasts and scholars alike. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

This book is a product of the XI International Conference on English Language and Literary Studies held in Montenegro in 2014. The “old spaces” were taken as a metaphorical tool for reintroducing a wide range of established topics with new approaches. Space was, thus, understood as physical, mechanical, continuous, linear, as measurable and symbolic, as subjective and relational, and as aesthetic. It was found on maps, in architecture, on theatre stages, in books, in hearts, in one’s identity, in time, and in theses and theories from the Aristotelian topos to Einstein’s construct of space-time. Therefore, the means of travel to these spaces and the forms the journeys take are also multifarious. However, so are the discursive strategies and their limitations when it comes to presenting the journeys and their destinations. The contributors to this volume represent a range of nationalities, and present research that either follows in the footsteps of other authors, in a literal or secondary literary journey to real geographical places, or observes the universal literary and old theoretical issues through new critical lenses. Indeed, they are often on both roads, witnessing how inextricable human efforts are to finding, identifying, and aestheticising oneself in relation to a particular space. Their contributions to this book expose how “spaces” were created and recreated through writing and symbolical representations in general. They also show how the images of these spaces have been changing in consent to the intentions of their visitors, and reveal that persistent and obstinate moment in a space that despite, or in spite of, changing perspectives, itself refuses to be changed. The book will encourage for further contributions to this expanding field in the humanities. In their numerous and distinct ways, the contributions to this particular book maintain that understanding how spaces are conceived and conceptualised is of pronounced importance in the globalized world in which cultures are gradually losing authenticities, while their spaces – geographical, tourist, spiritual, literary, aesthetic – are as reflective of the “visitors” as they are of the “hosts.”

A collection of critical essays examining numerous American authors and literary trends since colonial times.

In Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation, Michael Davitt Bell charts the important and often overlooked connection between literary culture and authors' careers. Bell's influential essays on nineteenth-century American writers—originally written for such landmark projects as The Columbia Literary History of the United States and The Cambridge History of American Literature—are gathered here with a major new essay on Richard Wright. Throughout, Bell revisits issues of genre with an eye toward the unexpected details of authors' lives, and invites us to reconsider the hidden functions that terms such as "romanticism" and "realism" served for authors and their critics. Whether tracing the demands of the market or the expectations of readers, Bell examines the intimate relationship between literary production and culture; each essay closely links the milieu in which American writers worked with the trajectory of their storied careers.