The Columbia Literary History of the United States

This literature is surveyed in the Columbia Literary History at such length, and with such skill, that it defeats the reviewer's duty to seek faults... -- Anthony Burgess The Atlantic This history summarizes where we are now and opens to us the many riches of the past, without attempting to present its findings for a single critical or dogmatic perspective or to establish a canon. Indeed a signal contribution to literary history. -- Murray S. Martin, University Librarian, Tufts University

A survey of the literature of United States, from prehistoric cave narratives to the radical movements of the sixties and the experimentation of the eighties.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.