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A Brief History of American Literature
By: Richard GrayeBook Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Imprint: Wiley-Blackwell
Format: ePub Encrypted (DRM)
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A Brief History of American Literature offers students and general readers a concise and up-to-date history of the full range of American writing from its origins until the present day. Represents the only up-to-date concise history of American literature Covers fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction, as well as looking at other forms of literature including folktales, spirituals, the detective story, the thriller and science fiction Considers how our understanding of American literature has changed over the past twenty years Offers students an abridged version of History of American Literature , a book widely considered the standard survey text Provides an invaluable introduction to the subject for students of American literature, American studies and all those interested in the literature and culture of the United States
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| Title of eBook: A Brief History of American Literature | |
| Release Date: 12-07-2010 | |
| Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell |
This eBook download is available in the following formats:
| Parent title | A Brief History of American Literature |
|---|---|
| Encrypted (DRM) | Yes |
| SKU | 9781444392456 |
| File size | 2907 |
| Security | n/a |
| Printing | Not allowed |
| Copying | Not allowed |
| Read aloud | No Sys requirements Download reader |
| Devices | Samsung Tablet, Apple Ipad & Iphone, Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo eReader, Aluratek Libre, Iliad, Nokia, Blackberry, Hanlin |
| Note | Excellent navigation features are available via Adobe such as bookmarks and a quick access table of contents. Text search is easily accessible. An Adobe DRM-protected file is different than a pdf file in that it uses Adobe DRM (Digital Rights Management) technology, which authors and publishers use to protect their content from illegal online distribution and to set certain privileges such as restrictions on copying and printing. |
A Brief History of American Literature
Chapter One
The First Americans American Literature During the Colonial and Revolutionary Periods
Imagining Eden
"America is a poem in our eyes: its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres." The words are those of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and they sum up that desire to turn the New World into words which has seized the imagination of so many Americans. But "America" was only one of the several names for a dream dreamed in the first instance by Europeans. "He invented America: a very great man," one character observes of Christopher Columbus in a Henry James novel; and so, in a sense, he did. Columbus, however, was following a prototype devised long before him and surviving long after him, the idea of a new land outside and beyond history: "a Virgin Countrey," to quote one early, English settler, "so preserved by Nature out of a desire to show mankinde fallen into the Old Age of Creation, what a brow of fertility and beauty she was adorned with when the world was vigorous and youthfull." For a while, this imaginary America obliterated the history of those who had lived American lives long before the Europeans came. And, as Emerson's invocation of "America ... a poem" discloses, it also erased much sense of American literature as anything other than the writing into existence of a New Eden.
Writing of the Colonial and Revolutionary Periods
Puritan narratives
There were, of course, those who dissented from this vision of a providential plan, stretching back to Eden an
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