The Cambridge History of American Literature: Volume 3, Prose Writing, 1860-1920Sacvan Bercovitch, Cyrus R. K. Patell 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. |
Contents
The American Literary Field 18601890 | 11 |
Museum Realism | 65 |
Howells James and the Republic of Letters | 107 |
3 Women and Realist Authorship | 137 |
Chesnutt and Imperial Spectacle | 181 |
5 Wharton Travel and Modernity | 224 |
Adams James Du Bois and Social thought | 247 |
An American Tragedy or the Promise of American Life | 287 |
Remembering Civil War | 421 |
Social Death and the Reconstruction of Slavery | 454 |
Cosmopolitan Variations | 492 |
NativeAmerican Sacrifice in an Age of Progress | 535 |
Marketing Culture | 568 |
Varieties of Work | 616 |
Corporate America | 666 |
Realist Utopias | 710 |
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