Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry concentrates on the challenges posed to poetry by modernist painting: how could the poets adapt to the painters' abilities to recast our understanding of the psyche's needs, powers, and social dependencies, and how could they share the painters' efforts to find alternatives to what seemed the inescapably ideological grounds for all value claims? By stressing the poets' ways of making the syntax of artworks carry semantic force, this orientation generates a much more dynamic, philosophically stimulating sense of modernist poetry than the ones offered by the dominant styles of political critique.

Charles Altieri's groundbreaking new book sets modernist American poetry in a precise cultural context by analyzing how major poets reacted to the challenge posed by modernist painting's radical critique of traditional representational models for art. It argues that modernist poets have tended to resist the received values of their contemporary culture by finding idealizing principles in modes of pure abstraction. It traces the use of such abstraction in literature from Wordsworth, through Baudelaire and Mallarmé, to T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein. There are summary chapters also on Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound, considerations of Cézanne and the Cubists, and a substantial theoretical discussion of the nature of abstract art.

Ekphrasis in American Poetry: The Colonial Period to the 21st Century provides a sample of the chronological range and stylistic variety of ekphrastic poetry, or poetry that engages in various ways with different types of visual art, including pictographs, paintings, moving panoramas, daguerreotypes, photographs, landscape, and more. The volume shows how ekphrasis has been a part of American poetry from its inception, and that as many American men as women have produced work in this genre. The book opens with an overview chapter followed by an examination of American ekphrastic poems during the formative Colonial period where Europe, Africa, and Indigenous America met in encounters that are depicted in art and literature. It closes with two chapters on Native American poetry that consider how American landscapes serve as ekphrastic prompts for personal and collective experiences. In between are contributions on men and women poets and artists who have engaged with ekphrasis in a variety of ways from different periods. As such, American ekphrasis emerges as a genre that has implications far beyond the Eurocentric versions of the canon that have hitherto been discussed in the critical literature on the topic.

Written by a leading critic, this invigorating introduction to modernist American poetry conveys the excitement that can be generated by a careful reading of modernist poems. Encourages readers to identify with the modernists’ sense of the revolutionary possibilities of their art. Embraces four generations of modernist American poets up through to the 1980s. Gives readers a sense of the ambitions, the disillusionments and the continuities of modernist poetry. Includes close readings of particular poems which show how readers can use these works to connect with what concerns them.

Updated throughout and with much new material, A History of American Literature, Second Edition, is the most up-to-date and comprehensive survey available of the myriad forms of American Literature from pre-Columbian times to the present. The most comprehensive and up-to-date history of American literature available today Covers fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction, as well as other forms of literature including folktale, spirituals, the detective story, the thriller, and science fiction Explores the plural character of American literature, including the contributions made by African American, Native American, Hispanic and Asian American writers Considers how our understanding of American literature has changed over the past?thirty years Situates American literature in the contexts of American history, politics and society Offers an invaluable introduction to American literature for students at all levels, academic and general readers

Modernist Invention attends to the parallel histories of media technology and modernist American poetry.