The Cambridge History of American Literature: Volume 8, Poetry and Criticism, 1940–1995: 08

Cambridge University Press, 3/29/1996
EAN 9780521497336, ISBN10: 0521497337

Hardcover, 576 pages, 23.5 x 15.9 x 3.2 cm
Language: English

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 Americanist literary criticism, thereby speaking for the continuities as well as the disruptions sustained between generations of scholarship. Generously proportioned narratives permit a broader vision of American literary history than has previously been possible, allowing the implicit voice of traditional criticism to join forces with the diversity of interests that characterise contemporary literary studies. Volume VIII, concerned with works of poetry and criticism written between 1940 and the present, brings together two different sets of materials and narrative forms, the aesthetic and the institutional. Discarding the traditional synoptic overview of major figures, von Hallberg, Graff, and Carton settle in favour of a history from the inside - a history of interstices and relations, equal to the task of considering the contexts of art, power, and criticism in which it is set.

Part I. Poetry, Politics, and Intellectuals Robert Von Hallberg
1. The place of poetry in the Culture, 1945–1950
2. Politics
3. Rear-guards
4. Avant-gardes
5. Authenticity
6. Translation
Conclusion
the place of poets 1995
Appendix I
Biographies of Poets
Part II. Criticism Since 1940 Evan Carton and Gerald Graff
Introduction
1. Politics and American criticism
2. The emergence of academic criticism
3. The nationalising of the new criticism
4. The canon, the academy, and gender
5. Deconstruction and post-structuralism
6. From textuality to materiality
7. Cultural and historical studies
Conclusion
academic criticism and its discontents
Appendix II
Biographies of critics
Chronology 1940–1945
Bibliography.