America is a nation making itself up as it goes along
- a story of discovery and invention unfolding in
speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented
feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad,
multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the
American experience, the authors and editors of this
volume find a new American history. In more than two
hundred original essays, ''A New Literary History of
America'' brings together the nation's many voices. From
the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth
century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in
cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the
book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what ''Made
in America'' means. Literature, music, film, art,
history, science, philosophy, political rhetoric -
cultural creations of every kind appear in relation to
each other, and to the time and place that give them
shape. The meeting of minds is extraordinary as
T.J.Clark writes on Jackson Pollock, Paul Muldoon on
Carl Sandburg, Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams,
Sarah Vowell on Grant Wood's American Gothic, Walter
Mosley on hard-boiled detective fiction, Jonathan Lethem
on Thomas Edison, Gerald Early on Tarzan, Bharati
Mukherjee on The Scarlet Letter, Gish Jen on Catcher in
the Rye, and Ishmael Reed on Huckleberry Finn. From Anne
Bradstreet and John Winthrop to Philip Roth and Toni
Morrison, from Alexander Graham Bell and Stephen Foster
to Alcoholics Anonymous, Life, Chuck Berry, Alfred
Hitchcock, and Ronald Reagan, this is America singing,
celebrating itself, and becoming something altogether
different, plural, singular, and new. |
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