All these methods yielded new dimensions of critical understanding, but in less-adept hands they became so riddled with jargon or so intensely political and ideological that they lost touch with the general reader, with common sense itself, and with any tradition of accessible criticism. This drew the ire of both conservatives, such as Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind (1987), and writers on the left, such as Russell Jacoby in The Last Intellectuals (1987) and Dogmatic Wisdom (1994). Reactions against theory-based criticism set in during the 1990s not only with attacks on “political correctness” but also with a return to more informal and essayistic forms of criticism that emphasized the role of the public intellectual and the need to reach a wider general audience. There was a revival of interest in literary journalism. Both older critics, such as Frank Lentricchia in The Edge of Night (1994) and Said in Out of Place (1999), and younger critics, including Alice Kaplan in French Lessons (1993), turned toward autobiography as a way of situating their own intellectual outlook and infusing personal expression into their work. James R. Giles Morris Dickstein The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Citation Information
Article Title: American literature
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 05 December 2018
URL: https://www.britannica.com/art/American-literature
Access Date: August 08, 2019
Additional Reading
Literary histories and major anthologies include Robert E. Spiller et al. (eds.), Literary History of the United States, 4th ed., rev., 2 vol. (1974), a standard general work; Marcus Cunliffe (ed.), American Literature to 1900, new ed. (1986, reissued 1993), and American Literature Since 1900, new ed. (1987, reissued 1993); Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920, 3 vol. (1927–30, reissued 1987), essential background reading; Walter Blair et al. (eds.), The Literature of the United States, 3rd ed., 2 vol. (1966); Cleanth Brooks, R.W.B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren (compilers), American Literature: The Makers and the Making, 2 vol. (1973); and Alfred Kazin, An American Procession (1984), portraits of individual writers from Emerson to Fitzgerald. Since the 1980s, anthologies have shifted to a multicultural viewpoint with broad coverage of writing by women and minorities. The most controversial example has been Paul Lauter and Richard Yarborough (eds.), The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 2nd ed., 2 vol. (1994). Recent full-scale literary histories representing the work of younger scholars include Emory Elliott et al. (eds.), The Columbia Literary History of the United States (1991); and Sacvan Bercovitch and Cyrus R.K. Patell (eds.), The Cambridge History of American Literature (1994– ). Blanche E. Gelfant (ed.), The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story (2000), is a comprehensive guide to short fiction.
Studies that focus on specific periods or trends of American literary history include the following: on the colonial era and the period of the early republic, Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (1953, reprinted 1983), and The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939, reissued 1983), two authoritative works; Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975), The American Jeremiad (1978), and The Rites of Assent (1993) are important syntheses of the Puritan influence on later American culture; Andrew Delbanco, The Puritan Ordeal (1989); and Moses Coit Tyler, A History of American Literature, 2 vol. (1879, reprinted 1973), and The Literary History of the American Revolution, 1763–1783, 2 vol. (1897, reprinted 1970); on the period of the American Revolution, closer to cultural history than criticism, Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (1976, reprinted 1987); Peter Shaw, American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution (1981); Emory Elliott, Revolutionary Writers (1982); and Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims (1982); on the post-Revolutionary era, Robert A. Ferguson, Law and Letters in American Culture (1984); and Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture from Revolution Through Renaissance (1986); on the American Renaissance, F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (1941, reprinted 1980), a classic study of the great writers of the 1850s; supplemented by studies of individual authors and of the popular writing of the period, including Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (1985), which discusses the sentimental novel; David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance (1988), a comprehensive view of the popular culture of the day; and Michael T. Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace (1985), a study of the material environment; and, on the period from the Civil War to the 20th century, Jay Martin, Harvests of Change: American Literature, 1865–1914 (1964), a comprehensive study; Arthur Hobson Quinn, A History of the American Drama, from the Beginning to the Civil War, 2nd ed. (1943, reprinted 1979), and A History of the American Drama, from the Civil War to the Present Day, rev. ed. (1964, reprinted 1980), the most thorough treatment; Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (1942, reprinted 1982), a brilliantly written critical history; and Morton Dauwen Zabel (ed.), Literary Opinion in America, 3rd ed., rev., 2 vol. (1962).
Important studies of the pastoral and frontier traditions in American literature are Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950, reissued 1978); R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (1955, reissued 1984); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964, reprinted 1972); and, from a radically different viewpoint, Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1800 (1973), and The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (1985). Major work on the romance tradition in American fiction begins with D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923, reissued 1977); and is developed in Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957, reprinted 1978); and Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (1966, reissued 1992); as well as in later studies such as Joel Porte, The Romance in America: Studies in Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James (1969); and Michael Davitt Bell, The Development of American Romance (1980). The vast influence of Emerson on American culture has been studied in Quentin Anderson, The Imperial Self (1971); and Irving Howe, The American Newness (1986). Other work on American realism, stressing the social and historical context, includes Eric J. Sundquist (ed.), American Realism: New Essays (1982); Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (1985); Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (1988); and David E. Shi, Facing Facts (1995). The role of race in American literature is the ambitious subject of Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations (1993); while ethnicity is closely analyzed in Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (1986). Other influential studies include Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (1995), focusing on race and culture; and Michael Denning, The Cultural Front (1996), an exploration of left-wing literary culture in the 1930s.