The late Leo Spitzer enjoyed a reputation as one of the twentieth century's outstanding philologists and linguists. His writings in the field of the romance languages and of comparative philology have been always stimulating, often controversial. This collection presents his essays in English and American literature which appeared in various journals and other publications during his lifetime. They range from an explication de texte of three great Middle English poems, through close scrutiny of writings of Donne, Milton, Keats, to a consideration of Edgar Allan Poe and Whitman, and, finally, to one of Yeats' poems. Each of the essays in this collection is illuminated and heightened by Professor Spitzer's careful and imaginative exegesis. The delightful "American Advertising Explained as Popular Art" is included as a sample of Professor Spitzer's commentary on American culture. Originally published in 1962. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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.

Here is a selection by the distinguished critic of his essays and commentaries on American writing and writers, from Emerson and Whitman through Auden and Ashbery. Denis Donoghue examines the canon in the light of what he takes to be the central dynamic of the American enterprise--the imperatives of a powerful national past versus the subversions of an irrevocably anarchic spirit.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Enthusiast! is a polemical history of American literature told from the point of view of six of its major enthusiasts. Complaining that his age was ‘retrospective’, Emerson injected enthusiasm into American literature as a way of making it new. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘is a man good for without enthusiasm? and what is enthusiasm but the daring of ruin for its object?’ This book takes enthusiasm to be a defining feature of American literature, showing how successive major writers – Melville, Thoreau, Pound, Moore, Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler – have modernized and re-modeled Emerson’s founding sense of enthusiasm. The book presents the writer as enthusiast, showing how enthusiasm is fundamental to the composition and the circulation of literature. Enthusiasm, it is argued, is the way literary value is passed on. Starting with a brief history of enthusiasm from Plato to Kant and Emerson, the book features chapters on each of Melville, Thoreau, Pound, Moore, O’Hara, and Schuyler. Each chapter presents an aspect of the writer as enthusiast, the book as a whole charting the changing sense of literary enthusiasm from Romanticism to the present day. Lucidly written and combatively argued, the book will appeal to readers of American Literature or Modern Poetry, and to all those interested in the circulation of literary work.

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.