The Cambridge History of American Literature: Volume 5, Poetry and Criticism, 1900–1950

Cambridge University Press, 1/16/2003
EAN 9780521301091, ISBN10: 0521301092

Hardcover, 636 pages, 23.4 x 15.7 x 4.1 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English

This is the fullest account to date of American poetry and literary criticism in the Modernist period. Andrew Dubois and Frank Lentricchia examine the work of Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens. They show how the conditions of literary production in a democratic, market-driven society forced the boldest of the Modernists to try to reconcile their need for commercial remuneration with their knowledge that their commitment to high art might never pay. Irene Ramalho Santos broadens the scope of the poetic scene through attention to a wide diversity of writers - with special emphasis on writers including Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and Langston Hughes. William Cain traces both the rise of an internationalist academic aesthetics and the process by which the study of a distinctive national literature was instituted. Considered together, these three narratives convey the astonishing Modernist poetic achievement in its full cultural, institutional, and aesthetic complexity.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Modernist Lyric in the Culture of Capital Andrew Dubois and Frank Lentricchia
1. Anthologies and audience, genteel to modern
2. Robert Frost
3. Wallace Stevens
4. T. S. Eliot
5. Ezra Pound
Epilogue
Part II. Poetry in the Machine Age Irene Ramalho Santos
1. Gertrude Stein
the poet as master of repetition
2. William Carlos Williams
in search of a western dialect
3. H. D.
a poet between worlds
4. Marianne Moore
a voracity of contemplation
5. Hart Crane
tortured with history
6. Langston Hughes
the color of modernism
Part III. Literary Criticism William Cain
Preface
1. Inventing American literature
2. Intellectuals, cultural critics, men and women of letters
3. Southerners, agrarians, and New Critics
the institutions of a modern criticism.