This comprehensive volume extensively treats Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, Hemingway and other long-cherished writers, while also giving considerable attention to more recent authors such as Kate Chopin and to forms of writing not studied amply in the past. Contributions by foremost scholars and critics reexamine in contemporary terms traditional subjects such as the importance of Puritanism, romanticism, and frontier humor in American life and writing. Some of the newer topics covered are the role of women as writers, readers, and literary subjects and the impact of writers from minority groups. The book sets forth a generation's interpretation of the rise of American civilization and culture. ISBN 0-231-05812-8: $59.95.

Includes index.

A key to the languages of America. The native voice ; The literature of discovery and exploration ; English literature at the American moment ; The Puritan vision of the New World -- The prose and poetry of Colonial America. History and chronicle ; Sermons and theological writings ; Biography and autobiography ; The poetry of Colonial America -- America in transition. From Cotton Mather to Benjamin Franklin ; Jonathan Edwards, Charles Chauncy, and the Great Awakening ; Thomas Jefferson and the writing of the south -- The literature of the New Republic. The American Revolution as a literary event ; Poetry in the early Republic ; Charles Brockden Brown and early American fiction ; Toward a national literature -- The age in perspective. Idealism and independence -- Cultural diversity and literary forms. Washington Irving and the Knickerbocker Group ; James Fenimore Cooper and the writers of the frontier ; Edgar Allan Poe and the writers of the Old South ; William Cullen Bryant and the Fireside Poets ; The rise of the woman author ; Forms of regional humor ; A new nation's drama -- Intellectual movements and social change. Social discourse and nonfictional prose ; The transcendentalists -- The American Renaissance. Ralph Waldo Emerson ; Henry David Thoreau ; Nathaniel Hawthorne ; Herman Melville ; Walt Whitman -- Signs of the times. Literature and culture ; Culture and consciousness -- Genre deliberations. Realism and regionalism ; Naturalism and the languages of determinism -- Literary diversities. Literature for the populace ; Immigrants and other Americans ; Women writers and the new woman -- Major voices. Emily Dickinson ; Mark Twain ; Henry Adams ; Henry James -- Contexts and backgrounds. The emergence of modernism ; Intellectual life and public discourse ; Literary scenes and literary movements -- Regionalism, ethnicity, and gender : comparative literary cultures. Regionalism : a diminished thing ; Afro-American literature ; Mexican American literature ; Asian American literature ; Women writers between the wars -- Fiction. The diversity of American fiction ; Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein ; William Faulkner -- Poetry and criticism. The diversity of American poetry ; Robert Frost ; Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot ; William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens ; Literary criticism -- The postwar era. Culture, power and society ; The new philosophy ; Literature as radical statement -- Forms and genres. Poetry ; Twentieth-century drama ; Neorealist fiction ; Self-reflexive fiction -- The present. The fictions of the present ; The avant-garde and experimental writing.