The Cambridge History of American Literature

by Edited by Sacvan Bercovitch

• ISBN13: 9780521497329
• ISBN10: 0521497329
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-06-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Volume VII of the Cambridge History of American Literature examines a broad range of American literature of the past half-century, revealing complex relations to changes in society. Christopher Bigsby discusses American dramatists from Tennessee Williams to August Wilson, showing how innovations in theatre anticipated a world of emerging countercultures and provided America with an alternative view of contemporary life. Morris Dickstein describes the condition of rebellion in fiction from 1940 to 1970, linking writers as diverse as James Baldwin and John Updike. John Burt examines writers of the American South, describing the tensions between modernization and continued entanglements with the past. Wendy Steiner examines the postmodern fictions since 1970, and shows how the questioning of artistic assumptions has broadened the canon of American literature. Finally, Cyrus Patell highlights the voices of Native American, Asian American, Chicano, gay and lesbian writers, often marginalized but here discussed within and against a broad set of national traditions.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii	(6)
Introduction	xiii
THE DRAMA 1940-1990	1	(100)
Christopher Bigsby, University of East Anglia
1 Introduction	3	(7)
2 Tennessee Williams	10	(10)
3 Arthur Miller	20	(24)
4 Edward Albee	44	(8)
5 Sam Shepard	52	(13)
6 David Mamet	65	(11)
7 Changing America: A Changing Drama?	76	(25)
FICTION AND SOCIETY, 1940-1970	101	(210)
Morris Dickstein, Graduate Center, City University of New York
1 War and the Novel: From World War II to Vietnam	103	(32)
2 The New Fiction: From the Home Front to the 1950s	135	(30)
3 On and Off the Road: The Outsider as Young Rebel	165	(59)
4 Apocalypse Now: A Literature of Extremes	224	(87)
AFTER THE SOUTHERN RENASCENCE	311	(114)
John Burt, Brandeis University
1 Introduction	313	(7)
2 Robert Penn Warren	320	(22)
3 Carson McCullers	342	(5)
4 Flannery O'Connor	347	(9)
5 Eudora Welty	356	(11)
6 Novels of Race and Class	367	(8)
7 Novels of Slavery and Reconstruction	375	(17)
8 Walker Percy	392	(13)
9 Reynolds Price	405	(16)
10 Peter Taylor	421	(4)
POSTMODERN FICTIONS, 1970-1990	425	(114)
Wendy Steiner, University of Pennsylvania
1 Rethinking Postmodernism	427	(24)
2 Fables of the Fetish	451	(28)
3 The End of Traditionalism	479	(20)
4 Women's Fiction: The Rewriting of History	499	(29)
5 Conclusion	528	(11)
EMERGENT LITERATURES	539	(137)
Cyrus R. K. Patell, New York University
1 From Marginal to Emergent	541	(23)
2 Comparative Racism and the Logic of Naturalization	564	(28)
3 Nisei Sons and Daughters	592	(23)
4 Legacies of the Sixties	615	(40)
5 Refusing to Go Straight	655	(16)
6 Beyond Hybridity	671	(5)
Appendix: Biographies	676	(41)
Chronology, 1940-1990	717	(46)
Bibliography	763	(12)
Index	775