The Cambridge History of American Literature addresses the broad spectrum of new and established directions in all branches of American writing and includes the work of scholars and critics who have shaped, and who continue to shape, what has become a major area of literary scholarship. The authors span three decades of achievement in American literary criticism, thereby speaking for the continuities as well as the disruptions sustained between generations of scholarship. Generously proportioned narratives allow at once for a broader vision and sweep of American literary history than has been possible previously, and while the voice of traditional criticism forms a background for these narratives, it joins forces with the diversity of interests that characterize contemporary literary studies.This book is 《VOLUME 4 NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETRY 1800-1910》

The Cambridge History of American Literature addresses the broad spectrum of new and established directions in all branches of American writing and includes the work of scholars and critics who have shaped, and who continue to shape, what has become a major area of literary scholarship. The authors span three decades of achievement in American literary criticism, thereby speaking for the continuities as well as the disruptions sustained between generations of scholarship. Generously proportioned narratives allow at once for a broader vision and sweep of American literary history than has been possible previously, and while the voice of traditional criticism forms a background for these narratives, it joins forces with the diversity of interests that characterize contemporary literary studies.

The History offers wide-ranging,interdisciplinary accounts of American genres and periods. Generated partly by the recent unearthing of previously neglected texts, the expansion of material in American literature coincides with a dramatic increase in the number and variety of approaches to that material. The multifaceted scholarly and critical enterprise embodied in The Cambridge History of American Literature addresses these multiplicities - the social,the cultural, the intellectual, and the aesthetic - and demonstrates a richer concept of authority in literary studies than is found in earlier accounts.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

AMERICAN VERSE TRADITIONS,1800-1855

 Barbara Packer

Preface: reverence and ambition

1. Neoclassicism: comic and satiric verse

2. Early narrative and lyric

3. Transcendentalism

4. John Greenleaf Whittier

POETRY AND PUBLIC DISCOURSE,1820-1910

Shira Wolosky

Preface: the claims of rhetoric

1. Modest claims

2. Claiming the Bible

3. Poetic languages

4. Plural identities

5. Walt Whitman: the office of the poet

6. Emily Dickinson: the violence of the imagination

Chronology, i8oo-I9io Neal Dolan

Bibliography

Index