1st Edition
From Puritanism to Postmodernism A History of American Literature
Preface to the Routledge Classics edition – Richard Ruland
Foreword to the Routledge Classics edition – Linda Wagner Martin
Preface
Part I The Literature of British America
1. The Puritan Legacy
2. Awakening and Enlightenment
Part II From Colonial Oppressor to Cultural Province
3. Revolution and (In)dependence
4. American Naissance
5. Yea-saying and Nay-saying
Part III Native and Cosmopolitan Crosscurrents: from Local Color to Realism and Naturalism
6. Secession and Loyalty
7. Muckrakers and Early Moderns
Part IV Modernism in the American Grain
8. Outland Darts and Homemade Worlds
9. The Second Flowering
10. Radical Reassessments
11. Strange Realities, Adequate Fictions
Epilogue - American Literary History in 1998: A Conversation with Josef Jar?b and Richard Ruland in Prague
Index
Biography
Malcolm Bradbury (1932-2000) was Professor of Literature and American Studies first at the University of Birmingham (1961-65) and then at the University of East Anglia from 1970 until his retirement in 1995. Bradbury became a Commander of the British Empire in 1991 for services to literature and was made a Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours 2000, again for services to literature.
Richard Ruland is Professor Emeritus of English, American, and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. After teaching in the English and American Studies programs at Yale University for several years, he has been a member of the English Department faculty at Washington University from 1967 until his recent retirement.
"Rarely has the national literature been made to cohere so convincingly: Ruland and Bradbury proceed smoothly from writer to writer, at every turn drawing illuminating connections…An elegant book."
The Washington Post"Highly informative…a map of American literature that puts every writer in place."
The New York Times"This is an excellent and readable survey of nearly 300 years of American writing and literary criticism in a flowing style that shows no signs of the tremendous concentration of information. Sure to become a classic; for general and special literature collections."
Library Journal"…a sound, balanced account of how American writers created works that reflected a new nation with new experience, a new science and a new politics on a new continent,…this is a comprehensive, often vibrant history of how American writers declared independence from older European forms before making their own unique contributions to world literature."
Kirkus Reviews
