Sacvan Bercovitch - Böcker

When Sacvan Bercovitch's The American Jeremiad first appeared in 1978, it was hailed as a landmark study of dissent and cultural formation in America, from the Puritans' writings through the major literary works of the antebellum era. For this long-awaited anniversary edition, Bercovitch has written a deeply thoughtful and challenging new preface that reflects on his classic study of the role of the political sermon, or jeremiad, in America from a contemporary perspective, while assessing developments in the field of American studies and the culture at large.

“Perhaps the most penetrating examination yet published of ‘the sources of our obsessive concern with the meaning of America.’”—Jack P. Greene, History “The most valuable achievement in colonial American literature since the best work of Perry Miller.”—David Levin, William and Mary Quarterly “A brave and brilliant book…that is the most significant and far-reaching contribution to the theory of American literature in recent years.”—Alan Trachtenberg, Partisan Review “A study which reaches with daring ease from the Bible and Augustine to Emerson and Whitman… [and] offers an agenda for the next several decades of scholarly work on colonial religious studies.”—John F. Wilson, Theology Today “[Bercovitch] casts a dazzling light on the myth of America and the conundrums of individuality and community that are the core of the American character.”—Michael Zuckerman, Early American Literature

The Rites of Assent examines the cultural strategies through which "America" served as a vehicle simultaneously for diversity and cohesion, fusion and fragmentation. Taking an ethnographic, cross-cultural approach, The Rites of Assent traces the meanings and purposes of "America" back to the colonial typology of mission, and specifically (in chapters on Puritan rhetoric, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and the movement from Revival to Revolution) to the legacy of early New England.

Over the last two decades a major revaluation has been taking place of the colonial Puritan imagination. With the growth of interest in early American literature has come increasing recognition of its quality and a better understanding of its place in the continuity of American culture. However, much of the best critical work to date has been published as articles in scholarly journals, and in bringing together for the first time the best work in this growing field the present anthology fills a number of important needs. It is at once a valuabale and accessible introduction for students, a summing-up of a new enterprise, and a guide for further studies.

This volume of essays brings together some of the best work by Americanists concerned with the problem of ideology and its bearing upon American literature and culture. It projects neither a particular ideological view nor a particular view of ideology. On the contrary: these essays highlight the many uses of ideology as a critical term, and, in doing so, they open fresh avenues of inquiry and forums for discussion. They also demonstrate that, far from being parochial or reductive, ideological analysis is integral to considerations of formal structure and crucial to an understanding of the relations between literature and culture. Their essays deal variously with theoretical issues, with questions of theme, genre, and perspective, and with interpretations of particular authors and texts. The editors of the volume provide a general introduction to the nature and development of ideological critique, and an afterword that discusses the coherence of the volume as a whole and its implications for further study.

Volume I of The Cambridge History of American Literature was originally published in 1997, and covers the colonial and early national periods and discusses the work of a diverse assemblage of authors, from Renaissance explorers and Puritan theocrats to Revolutionary pamphleteers and poets and novelists of the new republic. Addressing those characteristics that render the texts distinctively American while placing the literature in an international perspective, the contributors offer a compelling new evaluation of both the literary importance of early American history and the historical value of early American literature.

This is the fullest and richest account of the American Renaissance available in any literary history. The narratives in this volume made for a four-fold perspective on literature: social, cultural, intellectual and aesthetic. Michael D. Bell describes the social conditions of the literary vocation that shaped the growth of a professional literature in the United States. Eric Sundquist draws upon broad cultural patterns: his account of the writings of exploration, slavery, and the frontier is an interweaving of disparate voices, outlooks and traditions. Barbara L. Packer's sources come largely from intellectual history: the theological and philosophical controversies that prepared the way for transcendentalism. Jonathan Arac's categories are formalist: he sees the development of antebellum fiction as a dialectic of prose genres, the emergence of a literary mode out of the clash of national, local and personal forms. Together, these four narratives constitute a basic reassessment of American prose-writing between 1820 and 1865. It is an achievement that will remain authoritative for our time and that will set new directions for coming decades in American literary scholarship.

This volume covers a pivotal era in the formation of American identity. Four leading scholars connect the literature with the massive historical changes then underway. Richard Brodhead describes the foundation of a permanent literary culture in America. Nancy Bentley locates the origins of nineteenth century Realism in an elite culture's responses to an emergent mass culture, embracing high literature (writers like William Dean Howells and Henry James) as well as a wide spectrum of cultural outsiders: African Americans, women, and Native Americans. Walter Benn Michaels emphasizes the critical role that turn-of-the-century fiction played in the re-evaluation of the individual at the advent of modern bureaucracy. Susan L. Mizruchi analyzes the literary responses to a new national heterogeneity that helped shape the multicultural future of modern America. Together, these narratives constitute the richest, most detailed account to date of American literature and culture between 1860 and 1920.

This is the first complete narrative history of nineteenth-century American poetry. Barbara Packer explores the neoclassical and satiric forms mastered by the early Federalist poets; the creative reaches of once-celebrated, and still compelling, poets like Longfellow and Whittier; the distinctive lyric forms developed by Emerson and the Transcendentalists. Shira Wolosky provides a new perspective on the achievement of female poets of the period, as well as a close appreciation of African-American poets, including the collective folk authors of the Negro spirituals. She also illuminates the major works of the period, from Poe through Melville and Crane, to Whitman and Dickinson. The authors of this volume discuss this extraordinary literary achievement both in formal terms and in its sustained engagement with changing social and cultural conditions. In doing so they recover and elucidate American poetry of the nineteenth century for our twenty-first century pleasure, profit, and renewed study.

This is the fullest account to date of American poetry and literary criticism in the Modernist period. Andrew Dubois and Frank Lentricchia examine the work of Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens. They show how the conditions of literary production in a democratic, market-driven society forced the boldest of the Modernists to try to reconcile their need for commercial remuneration with their knowledge that their commitment to high art might never pay. Irene Ramalho Santos broadens the scope of the poetic scene through attention to a wide diversity of writers - with special emphasis on writers including Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and Langston Hughes. William Cain traces both the rise of an internationalist academic aesthetics and the process by which the study of a distinctive national literature was instituted. Considered together, these three narratives convey the astonishing Modernist poetic achievement in its full cultural, institutional, and aesthetic complexity.

Volume 6 of The Cambridge History of American Literature explores the emergence and flowering of modernism in the United States. David Minter provides a cultural history of the American novel from the 'lyric years' to World War I, through post-World War I disillusionment, to the consolidation of the Left in response to the mire of the Great Depression. Rafia Zafar tells the story of the Harlem Renaissance, detailing the artistic accomplishments of such diverse figures as Zora Neal Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and Richard Wright. Werner Sollors examines canonical texts as well as popular magazines and hitherto unknown immigrant writing from the period. Taken together these narratives cover the entire range of literary prose written in the first half of the twentieth century, offering a model of literary history for our times, focusing as they do on the intricate interplay between text and context.

Volume VII of the Cambridge History of American Literature examines a broad range of American literature of the past half-century, revealing complex relations to changes in society. Christopher Bigsby discusses American dramatists from Tennessee Williams to August Wilson, showing how innovations in theatre anticipated a world of emerging countercultures and provided America with an alternative view of contemporary life. Morris Dickstein describes the condition of rebellion in fiction from 1940 to 1970, linking writers as diverse as James Baldwin and John Updike. John Burt examines writers of the American South, describing the tensions between modernization and continued entanglements with the past. Wendy Steiner examines the postmodern fictions since 1970, and shows how the questioning of artistic assumptions has broadened the canon of American literature. Finally, Cyrus Patell highlights the voices of Native American, Asian American, Chicano, gay and lesbian writers, often marginalized but here discussed within and against a broad set of national traditions.

The Cambridge History of American Literature addresses the broad spectrum of new and established directions in all branches of American writing, and includes the work of scholars and critics who have shaped, and who continue to shape, what has become a major area of literary scholarship. The authors span three decades of achievement in Americanist literary criticism, thereby speaking for the continuities as well as the disruptions sustained between generations of scholarship. Generously proportioned narratives permit a broader vision of American literary history than has previously been possible, allowing the implicit voice of traditional criticism to join forces with the diversity of interests that characterise contemporary literary studies. Volume VIII, concerned with works of poetry and criticism written between 1940 and the present, brings together two different sets of materials and narrative forms, the aesthetic and the institutional. Discarding the traditional synoptic overview of major figures, von Hallberg, Graff, and Carton settle in favour of a history from the inside - a history of interstices and relations, equal to the task of considering the contexts of art, power, and criticism in which it is set.

Volume I of The Cambridge History of American Literature was originally published in 1997, and covers the colonial and early national periods and discusses the work of a diverse assemblage of authors, from Renaissance explorers and Puritan theocrats to Revolutionary pamphleteers and poets and novelists of the new republic. Addressing those characteristics that render the texts distinctively American while placing the literature in an international perspective, the contributors offer a compelling new evaluation of both the literary importance of early American history and the historical value of early American literature.

'Recipient of the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize.' "Goes a long way to proving that any literary masterpiece, read with sympathy and intelligence, works to re-establish the connections between the work of art and the life and thought of its time."--James R. Mellow, 'Times Literary Supplement'

"The Scarlet Letter has proved our most enduring classic," writes Sacvan Bercovitch, "because it is the liberal example par excellence of art as ideological mimesis. To understand the office of the A is to see how culture empowers symbolic form, including forms of dissent, and how symbols participate in the dynamics of culture, including the dynamics of constraint."With an approach that both reflects and contests developments in literary studies, Bercovitch explores these connections from two perspectives: first, he examines a historical reading of the novel's unities; and then, a rhetorical analysis of key mid-nineteenth-century issues, at home and abroad. In order to highlight the relation between rhetoric and history, he focuses on the point at which the scarlet letter does its office at last, the moment when Hester decides to come home to America.In The Office of "The Scarlet Letter," Bercovitch argues that the process by which the United States usurped "America" for itself, symbolically, is also the process by which liberalism established political and economic dominance. In the course of his study, he offers sustained discussions of Hawthorne's irony and ambiguity, of aesthetic and social strategies of cohesion, and of the conundrums of liberal dissent. Winner of the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowe prize, The Office of "The Scarlet Letter" provides a theoretical redefinition of the function of symbolism in culture and an exemplary literary-ideological reading of a major text.