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 (1994). His History of American Literature (Blackwell, 2004) is widely considered to be one of the standard works on the subject.

• Acknowledgments xi1 The First Americans: American Literature Before and During the Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 1Imagining Eden 1Native American Oral Traditions 4Spanish and French Encounters with America 14Anglo-American Encounters 21Writing of the Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 27Puritan narratives 28Challenges to the Puritan oligarchy 32Some colonial poetry 36Enemies within and without 44Trends toward the secular and resistance 48Toward the Revolution 60Alternative voices of Revolution 69Writing Revolution: Poetry, drama, fiction 752 Inventing Americas: The Making of American Literature, 1800–1865 88Making a Nation 88The Making of American Myths 92Myths of an emerging nation 92The making of Western myth 95The making of Southern myth 105Legends of the Old Southwest 109The Making of American Selves 114The Transcendentalists 114Voices of African-American identity 126The Making of Many Americas 133Native American writing 134Oral culture of the Hispanic Southwest 139African-American polemic and poetry 141Abolitionist and pro-slavery writing 145Abolitionism and feminism 154African-American writing 161The Making of an American Fiction and Poetry 171The emergence of American narratives 171Women writers and storytellers 190Spirituals and folk songs 196American poetic voices 1993 Reconstructing the Past, Reimagining the Future: The Development of American Literature, 1865–1900 219Rebuilding a Nation 219The Development of Literary Regionalism 224From Adam to outsider 224Regionalism in the West and Midwest 231African-American and Native American voices 233Regionalism in New England 235Regionalism in the South 239The Development of Literary Realism and Naturalism 255Capturing the commonplace 255Capturing the real thing 259Toward Naturalism 269The Development of Women’s Writing 281Writing by African-American women 281Writing and the condition of women 284The Development of Many Americas 290Things fall apart 290Voices of resistance 293Voices of reform 295The immigrant encounter 2994 Making It New: The Emergence of Modern American Literature, 1900–1945 308Changing National Identities 308Between Victorianism and Modernism 320The problem of race 320Building bridges: Women writers 326Critiques of American provincial life 336Poetry and the search for form 345The Inventions of Modernism 359Imagism, Vorticism, and Objectivism 359Making it new in poetry 367Making it new in prose 397Making it new in drama 420Traditionalism, Politics, and Prophecy 431The uses of traditionalism 431Populism and radicalism 446Prophetic voices 462Community and Identity 466Immigrant writing 466Native American voices 472The literature of the New Negro movement and beyond 476Mass Culture and the Writer 503Western, detective, and hardboiled fiction 503Humorous writing 509Fiction and popular culture 5125 Negotiating the American Century: American Literature since 1945 519Toward a Transnational Nation 519Formalists and Confessionals 532From the mythological eye to the lonely “I” in poetry 532From formalism to freedom in poetry 540The uses of formalism 548Confessional poetry 554New formalists, new confessionals 563Public and Private Histories 568Documentary and dream in prose 568Contested identities in prose 576Crossing borders: Some women prose writers 588Beats, Prophets, Aesthetes, and New Formalists 599Rediscovering the American voice: The Black Mountain writers 599Restoring the American vision: The San Francisco Renaissance 606Recreating American rhythms: The beat generation 610Reinventing the American self: The New York poets 615Redefining American poetry: The New Formalists 623Resisting orthodoxy: Dissent and experiment in fiction 631The Art and Politics of Race 640Defining a new black aesthetic 640Defining a new black identity in prose 651Defining a new black identity in drama 663Telling impossible stories: Recent African-American fiction 668Realism and its Discontents 678Confronting the real, stretching the realistic in drama 678New Journalists and dirty realists 700Language and Genre 705Watching nothing: Postmodernity in prose 705The actuality of words: Postmodern poetry 720Signs and scenes of crime, science fiction, and fantasy 727Creating New Americas 740Dreaming history: European immigrant writing 740Remapping a nation: Chicano/a and Latino/a writing 748Improvising America: Asian-American writing 763New and ancient songs: The return of the Native American 779After the Fall: American Literature since 9/11 795Writing the crisis in prose 795Writing the crisis in drama 809Writing the crisis in poetry 816Further Reading 829Index 857

"Richard Gray's real achievement is somehow to have compressed more than 400 years of thrillingly rich literary history between two covers." (Literary Review)