The Cambridge Introduction to Early American Literature offers students a literary history of American writing in English between 1492 and 1820, as well as providing a concise social and cultural history of these three centuries. Emory Elliott traces the impact of race, gender, and ethnic conflict on early American culture, and explores the centrality of American Puritanism in the formation of a distinctively American literature. This highly engaging and comprehensive study will be essential reading for students of the literature, history and culture of early America.
For the first time in four decades, there exists an authoritative and up-to-date survey of the literature of the United States, from prehistoric cave narratives to the radical movements of the sixties and the experimentation of the eighties. This comprehensive volume—one of the century's most important books in American studies—extensively treats Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, Hemingway, and other long-cherished writers, while also giving considerable attention to recently discovered writers such as Kate Chopin and to literary movements and forms of writing not studied amply in the past. Informed by the most current critical and theoretical ideas, it sets forth a generation's interpretation of the rise of American civilization and culture. The Columbia Literary History of the United States contains essays by today's foremost scholars and critics, overseen by a board of distinguished editors headed by Emory Elliott of Princeton University. These contributors reexamine in contemporary terms traditional subjects such as the importance of Puritanism, Romanticism, and frontier humor in American life and writing, but they also fully explore themes and materials that have only begun to receive deserved attention in the last two decades. Among these are the role of women as writers, readers, and literary subjects and the impact of writers from minority groups, both inside and outside the literary establishment.
For years, scholars have attempted to understand the powerful hold that the sermon had upon the imagination of New England Puritans. In this book Emory Elliott puts forth a complex and striking thesis: that Puritan religious literature provided the myths and metaphors that helped the people to express their deepest doubts and fears, feelings created by their particular cultural situation and aroused by the crucial social events of seventeenth-century America. In his early chapters, the author defines the psychological needs of the second- and third-generation Puritans, arguing that these needs arose from the generational conflict between the founders and their children and from the methods of child rearing and religious education employed in Puritan New England. In the later chapters, he reveals how the ministers responded to the crisis in their society by reshaping theology and constructing in their sermons a religious language that helped to fulfill the most urgent psychological needs of the people. Originally published in 1975. 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.
For years, scholars have attempted to understand the powerful hold that the sermon had upon the imagination of New England Puritans. In this book Emory Elliott puts forth a complex and striking thesis: that Puritan religious literature provided the myths and metaphors that helped the people to express their deepest doubts and fears, feelings created by their particular cultural situation and aroused by the crucial social events of seventeenth-century America. In his early chapters, the author defines the psychological needs of the second- and third-generation Puritans, arguing that these needs arose from the generational conflict between the founders and their children and from the methods of child rearing and religious education employed in Puritan New England. In the later chapters, he reveals how the ministers responded to the crisis in their society by reshaping theology and constructing in their sermons a religious language that helped to fulfill the most urgent psychological needs of the people. Originally published in 1975. 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.
Elliott demonstrates how America's first men of letters--Timothy Dwight, Joel Barlow, Philip Freneau, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and Charles Brockden Brown--sought to make individual genius in literature express the collective genius of the American people. Without literary precedent to aid them, Elliott argues, these writers attempted to convey a vision of what America ought to be; and when the moral imperatives implicit in their writings were rejected by the vast number of their countrymen they became pioneers of another sort--the first to experience the alienation from mainstream American culture that would become the fate of nearly all serious writers who would follow.
Designed as a companion to The Columbia Literary History of the United States, this compilation of 31 major essays covers the American novel from the 1700s to the present, although the majority deal with the 20th century. Within each era, themes, genres, and topics such as realism, gender, romance, and technology are discussed in depth, as well as modern Canadian, Caribbean, and Latin American fiction. Each essayist selects only the authors who best illustrate the topic, thus subtly skewing the view of the literary scene at that time. The volume also covers women, minorities, popular fiction, and the book marketplace. ISBN 0-231-07360-7: $59.95.
This comprehensive, up-to-date survey examines the literature of the United States, from prehistoric cave narratives to the radical movements of the sixties and the experimentation of the eighties
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