"An excellent overview of intellectual and artistic debates that have decided the course of American literary thought over the past two centuries."--Gene Jarrett, Brown University"A splendidly informed, useful gathering of key documents in the formation of multi-vocal American literary culture. Essential for courses in American cultural studies and American literary studies."--Giles Gunn, University of California, Santa Barbara"Superb assortment of essential essays that I would definitely assign along with a number of wonderful readings with which I had not previously been familiar. Will recommend as a required text and definitely assign as suggested reading."--Lauri Ramey, Hampton University

• I. FORMATIONS 1: St. Jean de Crevecoeur, "What Is an American?" 2: Toward a Definition of American Literature (selections): Charles Brockden Brown, "To the Public" William Tudor, Excerpt from North American Review James Kirk Paulding, "National Literature" Edgar Allan Poe, "Marginalia" William Gilmore Simms, "Americanism in Literature" 3: Margaret Fuller, "American Literature" 4: Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar" 5: Cornelius Mathews, "Nationality in Literature" 6: Theodore Parker, "The American Scholar" 7: Nathaniel Hawthorne, prefaces to The House of the Seven Gables, Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun 8: Herman Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses" 9: Frederick Douglass, "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro" 10: Mary E. Bryan, "How Should Women Write?" 11: Walt Whitman, "Democratic Vistas" 12: Henry James, From "Hawthorne" 13: William Dean Howells, From Criticism and Fiction 14: Mark Twain, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences" 15: The Great American Novel (selections): William De Forest, "The Great American Novel" Thomas S. Perry, "American Novels" Robert Herrick, "The American Novel" Edith Wharton, "The Great American Novel" II. MODERN AMERICAN CRITICISM, 1900-45 1: W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Sorrow Songs" 2: Gertrude Atherton, "Why Is American Literature Bourgeois?" 3: George Santayana, "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy" 4: Van Wyck Brooks, "On Creating a Usable Past" 5: Irving Babbitt, "The Critic and American Life" 6: H.L. Mencken, "The American Novel" 7: Alain Locke, "The New Negro" 8: Mike Gold, "Proletarian Realism" 9: John Crowe Ransom, "Reconstructed but Unregenerate" 10: Constance Rourke, from American Humor 11: Zora Neale Hurston, "Charactersitics of Negro Expression" 12: Kenneth Burke, "Literature as Equipment for Living" 13: J. Saunders Redding, "The Forerunners" 14: Philip Rahv, "The Cult of Experience in American Writing" 15: R.P. Blackmur, "The Economy of the American Writer" III. POSTWAR ERA, 1945-1970 1: F.O. Matthiessen, "The Responsibilities of the Critic" 2: Leslie Fiedler, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" 3: Lionel Trilling, "Reality in America" 4: Ralph Ellison, "Richard Wright's Blues" 5: James Baldwin, "Everybody's Protest Novel" 6: T.S. Eliot, "American Liteature and the American Language" 7: Henry Nash Smith, "The Myth of the Garden and Turner's Frontier Hypothesis" 8: Perry Miller, "Errance into the Wilderness" 9: Americo Paredes, "The Hero's Progress" 10: Edmund Wilson, "Harriet Beecher Stowe" 11: Dwight MacDonald, "Masscult and Midcult" 12: Alfred Kazin, "The Jew as Modern American Writer" 13: Adrienne Rich, "Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson" IV. CONTEMPORARIES, 1970-1998 1: Nina Baym, "Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors" 2: William Boelhower, "A Modest Ethnic Proposal" 3: Jane Tompkins, "'But Is It Any Good?': The Institutionalization of Literary Value" 4: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Writing, 'Race,' and the Difference It Makes" 5: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic" 6: Hortense J. Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" 7: Sacvan Bercovitch, "Hawthorne's A-Morality of Compromise" 8: Toni Morrison, "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature" 9: Walter Benn Michaels, "The Vanishing American" 10: Fredric Jameson, "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" 11: Gloria Anzaldua, "How to Tame a Wild Tongue" 12: Lawrence Buell, "American Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenomenon"

"An excellent overview of intellectual and artistic debates that have decided the course of American literary thought over the past two centuries."--Gene Jarrett, Brown University"A splendidly informed, useful gathering of key documents in the formation of multi-vocal American literary culture. Essential for courses in American cultural studies and American literary studies."--Giles Gunn, University of California, Santa Barbara"Superb assortment of essential essays that I would definitely assign along with a number of wonderful readings with which I had not previously been familiar. Will recommend as a required text and definitely assign as suggested reading."--Lauri Ramey, Hampton University

• I. FORMATIONS 1: St. Jean de Crevecoeur, "What Is an American?" 2: Toward a Definition of American Literature (selections): Charles Brockden Brown, "To the Public" William Tudor, Excerpt from North American Review James Kirk Paulding, "National Literature" Edgar Allan Poe, "Marginalia" William Gilmore Simms, "Americanism in Literature" 3: Margaret Fuller, "American Literature" 4: Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar" 5: Cornelius Mathews, "Nationality in Literature" 6: Theodore Parker, "The American Scholar" 7: Nathaniel Hawthorne, prefaces to The House of the Seven Gables, Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun 8: Herman Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses" 9: Frederick Douglass, "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro" 10: Mary E. Bryan, "How Should Women Write?" 11: Walt Whitman, "Democratic Vistas" 12: Henry James, From "Hawthorne" 13: William Dean Howells, From Criticism and Fiction 14: Mark Twain, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences" 15: The Great American Novel (selections): William De Forest, "The Great American Novel" Thomas S. Perry, "American Novels" Robert Herrick, "The American Novel" Edith Wharton, "The Great American Novel" II. MODERN AMERICAN CRITICISM, 1900-45 1: W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Sorrow Songs" 2: Gertrude Atherton, "Why Is American Literature Bourgeois?" 3: George Santayana, "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy" 4: Van Wyck Brooks, "On Creating a Usable Past" 5: Irving Babbitt, "The Critic and American Life" 6: H.L. Mencken, "The American Novel" 7: Alain Locke, "The New Negro" 8: Mike Gold, "Proletarian Realism" 9: John Crowe Ransom, "Reconstructed but Unregenerate" 10: Constance Rourke, from American Humor 11: Zora Neale Hurston, "Charactersitics of Negro Expression" 12: Kenneth Burke, "Literature as Equipment for Living" 13: J. Saunders Redding, "The Forerunners" 14: Philip Rahv, "The Cult of Experience in American Writing" 15: R.P. Blackmur, "The Economy of the American Writer" III. POSTWAR ERA, 1945-1970 1: F.O. Matthiessen, "The Responsibilities of the Critic" 2: Leslie Fiedler, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" 3: Lionel Trilling, "Reality in America" 4: Ralph Ellison, "Richard Wright's Blues" 5: James Baldwin, "Everybody's Protest Novel" 6: T.S. Eliot, "American Liteature and the American Language" 7: Henry Nash Smith, "The Myth of the Garden and Turner's Frontier Hypothesis" 8: Perry Miller, "Errance into the Wilderness" 9: Americo Paredes, "The Hero's Progress" 10: Edmund Wilson, "Harriet Beecher Stowe" 11: Dwight MacDonald, "Masscult and Midcult" 12: Alfred Kazin, "The Jew as Modern American Writer" 13: Adrienne Rich, "Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson" IV. CONTEMPORARIES, 1970-1998 1: Nina Baym, "Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors" 2: William Boelhower, "A Modest Ethnic Proposal" 3: Jane Tompkins, "'But Is It Any Good?': The Institutionalization of Literary Value" 4: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Writing, 'Race,' and the Difference It Makes" 5: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic" 6: Hortense J. Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" 7: Sacvan Bercovitch, "Hawthorne's A-Morality of Compromise" 8: Toni Morrison, "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature" 9: Walter Benn Michaels, "The Vanishing American" 10: Fredric Jameson, "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" 11: Gloria Anzaldua, "How to Tame a Wild Tongue" 12: Lawrence Buell, "American Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenomenon"