The Cambridge History of American Literature: Volume 7, Prose Writing, 1940-1990Sacvan Bercovitch, Cyrus R. K. Patell 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. |
Contents
Introduction | 3 |
Tennessee Williams | 10 |
Arthur Miller | 20 |
Edward Albee | 44 |
Sam Shepard | 52 |
David Mamet | 65 |
Changing America A Changing Drama? | 76 |
FICTION AND SOCIETY 19401970 | 101 |
Reynolds Price | 405 |
Peter Taylor | 421 |
POSTMODERN FICTIONS 19601990 | 425 |
Rethinking Postmodernism | 427 |
Fables of the Fetish | 451 |
The End of Traditionalism | 479 |
Womens Fiction The Rewriting of History | 499 |
Conclusion | 528 |
War and the Novel From World II to Vietnam | 103 |
The New Fiction From the Home Front to the 1950s | 135 |
On and Off the Road The Outsider as Young Rebel | 165 |
Apocalypse Now A Literature of Extremes | 224 |
AFTER THE SOUTHERN RENASCENCE | 311 |
Introduction | 313 |
Robert Penn Warren | 320 |
Carson McCullers | 342 |
Flannery OConnor | 347 |
Eudora Welty | 356 |
Novels of Race and Class | 367 |
Novels of Slavery and Reconstruction | 375 |
Walker Percy | 392 |
Common terms and phrases
African American American culture American literature Arthur Miller Asian American audience autobiography Baldwin Barth become begins Bellow characters Chicano Chinese American comic critics death describes drama dream Ellison emergent essay ethnic experience explore fantasy father Faulkner feeling fiction film Frank Chin Gravity's Rainbow homosexual human Hutch identity imagination immigrants Indian individual irony Issei Japanese Jewish Jews John John Barth Kerouac killed language later lesbian literary lives Mailer Maxine Hong Kingston memory metaphor Mexican Miller moral mother myths narrative narrator Native American Nisei No-No Boy novel novelists past play plot political Portnoy's Complaint postmodern postwar protagonist published Pynchon racial reader reality relationship road novel Roth Roth's seems sense sexual social society Southern story tells Tennessee Williams theater theme tion tradition turn University Vietnam voice wife Williams woman women writers wrote young