A History of American Literature

Gray, Richard

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1405192283 ISBN 13: 9781405192286

Casa editrice: Blackwell Pub, 2011

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

Recensione:

"This book is the first comprehensive, single volume history of American literature since The Columbia Literary History of the United States edited by Elliott Emory and published sixteen years ago. It is a puzzle, given the extraordinary interest in American literature at home and abroad, that so few full histories of American literature have been published. Consider the fact that the Columbia history arrived nearly four decades after R. E. Spiller′s Literary History of the United States. What makes Gray′s book so extraordinary is that it supercedes the Spiller and Emory texts in nearly every respect, and even challenges the supremacy of the titanic (this pun is intentional), multi–volume, still–evolving Cambridge History of American Literature. How Gray managed to so captivatingly capture the depth and breadth of so complex a literature in under a thousand pages is worth considering. [...] Richard Gray possesses the most balanced scholarship of the entire range of American literature I ever read. [...] This is the first history of American literature fully worthy of the multi–dimensionality of its subject."
Norman Weinstein, Boise State University

L'autore:

Richard Gray is Professor of Literature at the University of Essex and former Distinguished Visiting Professor at a number of universities in the United States.  He is the first specialist in American literature to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy and has published over a dozen books on the topic, including the award-winning Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (1986) and The Life of William Faulkner: A Critical Biography (1994). His History of American Literature (Blackwell, 2004) is widely considered to be one of the standard works on the subject.