Brief History of American Literature

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 (1944).  His History of  American Literature is widely considered to be one of the standard works on the subject.

• Preface and Acknowledgments ix1 The First Americans: American Literature During the Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 1Imagining Eden 1Writing of the Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 12 Inventing Americas: The Making of American Literature 1800–1865 47Making a Nation 47The Making of American Myths 47The Making of American Selves 59The Making of Many Americas 71The Making of an American Fiction and Poetry 903 Reconstructing the Past, Reimagining the Future: The Development of American Literature 1865–1900 115 Rebuilding a Nation 115The Development of Literary Regionalisms 115The Development of Literary Realism and Naturalism 130The Development of Women’s Writing 143The Development of Many Americas 1484 Making It New: The Emergence of Modern American Literature 1900–1945 159Changing National Identities 159Between Victorianism and Modernism 159The Inventions of Modernism 176Traditionalism, Politics, and Prophecy 211Community and Identity 226Mass Culture and the Writer 2425 Negotiating the American Century: American Literature since 1945 249Towards a Transnational Nation 249Formalists and Confessionals 249Public and Private Histories 263Beats, Prophets, and Aesthetes 281The Art and Politics of Race 296Realism and Its Discontents 314Language and Genre 328Creating New Americas 345Index 373