Landmark volume of D. H. Lawrence's writings on American literature including major essays on Poe, Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman.

This book considers the fascination with the free market and the economic world evident within postwar literature.

For more than a decade, Americanists have been concerned with the problem of ideology, and have undertaken a broad reassessment of American literature and culture. This volume brings together some of the best work in this area.

This book contains thirteen original essays about Puritan culture in colonial New England. Prompted by the growing interest in secular studies, as well as postnational, transnational, and postcolonial critique in the humanities, American Literature and the New Puritan Studies seeks to represent and advance contemporary interest in a field long recognized, however problematically, as foundational to the study of American literature. It invites readers of American literature and culture to reconsider the role of seventeenth-century Puritanism in the creation of the United States of America and its consequent cultural and literary histories. It also records the significant transformation in the field of Puritan studies that has taken place in the last quarter century. In addition to re-reading well known texts of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, the volume contains essays focused on unknown or lesser studied events and texts, as well as new scholarship on post-Puritan archives, monuments, and historiography.

Gender in American Literature and Culture introduces readers to key developments in gender studies and American literary criticism. It offers nuanced readings of literary conventions and genres from early American writings to the present and moves beyond inflexible categories of masculinity and femininity that have reinforced misleading assumptions about public and private spaces, domesticity, individualism, and community. The book also demonstrates how rigid inscriptions of gender have perpetuated a legacy of violence and exclusion in the United States. Responding to a sense of 21st century cultural and political crisis, it illuminates the literary histories and cultural imaginaries that have set the stage for urgent contemporary debates.

Although American literature is a standard subject in the American college curriculum, a century ago few people thought it should be taught there. Elizabeth Renker uncovers the complex historical process through which American literature overcame its image of aesthetic and historical inferiority to become an important field for academic study and research. Renker's extensive original archival research focuses on four institutions of higher education serving distinct regional, class, race and gender populations. She argues that American literature's inferior image arose from its affiliation with non-elite schools, teachers and students, and that it had to overcome this social identity in order to achieve status as serious knowledge. Renker's revisionary analysis is an important contribution to the intellectual history of the United States and will be of interest to anyone studying, teaching or researching American literature.

American Literature, American Culture is the first comprehensive anthology of American literary criticism to appear in many years and the first collection to bring together the tradition of American literary criticism as cultural critique. This unique anthology assembles reviews of early works, major critical essays, excerpts from landmark studies, and the most influential examples of the criticism practiced today. The selections address the dominant questions in the American literary tradition: What are the cultural responsibilities of the American writer? What are the characteristics of a national literature? Is a national literature even possible? How do gender and race affect the way we understand literature? What role does literature play in a democratic society? Organized chronologically, the four sections of the volume gather the most vital and enduring arguments in American literary and cultural politics in each era, covering such prominent issues as American exceptionalism, the racial divide, gender, and class identity. The book pays particular attention to the historical background of contemporary debates about multiculturalism. American Literature, American Culture is ideal for undergraduate and graduate courses in American literature, criticism, and American Studies. It also serves as a useful supplementary text in upper-level courses in criticism. Its range proves that at every juncture of the nation's intellectual history, criticism has provided an indispensable way of determining America's most fundamental meanings.