This incisive book traces the attack on American provincialism that ended the myth of the Happy Village. Replacing the idyllic life as a theme, American writers in revolt turned to a more realistic interpretation of the town, stressing its repressiveness, dullness, and conformity. This book analyzes the literary technique employed by these writers and explores their sensibilities to evaluate both their artistic accomplishments and their contributions...

In this book, Alfred Kazin, who for more than thirty years has been one of the central figures of America's intellectual life, takes us into his own life and times. His autobiography encompasses a personal story openly told, an inside look at New York's innermost intellectual circles, strong and intimate revelations of many of the most important writers of the century, and brilliantly astute observations of the literary accomplishments, atmosphere,...

Between 1850 and 1940, with the rise of managerial capitalism in the United States, the most powerful businesses ceased to be family owned, instead becoming sprawling organizations controlled by complex bureaucracies. Sentimental literature-work written specifically to convey and inspire deep feeling-does not seem to fit with a swiftly bureaucratizing society. Surprisingly, though, sentimental language persisted in American literature, even as a culture...

"Shortlisted for the 2011 American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Textual Study of Religion" Amy Hungerford is professor of English at Yale University. She is the author of The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification. How can intense religious beliefs coexist with pluralism in America today? Examining the role of the religious imagination in contemporary religious practice and in some of the best-known works...

During the 1980s and 1990s, the Resource Institute, headed by Jonathan White, held a series of "floating seminars" aboard a sixty-five-foot schooner featuring leading thinkers and artists from a broad array of disciplines. Over a period of ten years, White conducted interviews with the writers, scientists, environmentalists, and poets who gathered on board to explore our relationship to the wild. The interviews are gathered in this sparkling collection....

"In the summer of 1977, Allen Ginsberg decided it was time to teach a course on the literary history of the Beat Generation. This was twenty years after the publication of his landmark poem "Howl," and Jack Kerouac's seminal book On the Road. Through the creation of this course, which he ended up teaching five times, first at the Naropa Institute and later at Brooklyn College, Ginsberg saw an opportunity to make a record of the history of Beat Literature....

Demonstrating the timely relevance of Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Jack London and Henry Adams, this book shows how debates about evolution, identity, and a shifting world picture have uncanny parallels with the emerging global systems that shape our own lives. Tracing these systems' take-off point in the early twentieth century through the lens of popular science journalism, John Bruni makes a valuable contribution to the study of how biopolitical...

An engaging examination of Black Girl Magic and its significance in American literature In Light and Legacies, author Janaka Bowman Lewis examines Black girlhood in American literature from the mid-twentieth century to the present. The representation of Black girlhood in contemporary literature has long remained underexplored. Through this literary history of "Black Girl Magic," Lewis offers one of the first studies in this rapidly growing field of...

"The attempt to understand the desires related to radical, risky acts like climbing to 29,028 feet as well as the everyday participation in and fascination with extreme lifestyles lays at the heart of this book and the extreme adventure narratives it studies. The American Adrenaline Narrative identifies and examines such stories' desiring natures and considers how perilous outdoor adventure tales, what the author terms "adrenaline narratives," simultaneously...