Literature - Valparaiso

This book outlines the indispensable information in America's rich literary past--from major publications to lesser-known gems--while also Authors and their works are grouped within each year by category: fiction and nonfiction; poems; drama; literary criticism; and publishing events. Short, concise entries describe an author's major works for a particular year while placing them within the larger context of that writer's career. Perhaps most important, The Chronology offers an invaluable line through our literary past, tying literature to the American experience--war and peace, boom and bust, and reaction to social change.

America is a nation making itself up as it goes along--a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In more than two hundred original essays, A New Literary History of America brings together the nation's many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what "Made in America" means.

American Literature Before 1880 attempts to place its subject in the broadest possible international perspective. It begins with Homer looking westward, and ends with Henry James crossing the Atlantic eastwards. It is intended both as an introduction for undergraduates to the richness and variety of American Literature, and as a contribution to the debate about its distinctive nature.

This book offers an enormous range of writers-from Sojourner Truth to Frederick Douglass, from Zora Neale Hurston to Ralph Ellison, and from Toni Morrison to August Wilson.

Perhaps the most defining characteristic of American literature composed after World War II is the rejection of conventional form and structure with its increasingly uninhibited and experimental style. Embracing works from previously marginalized groups like African Americans and women and ushering in new genres, contemporary American literature has progressively begun to mirror the American population in diversity and versatility. In this volume, readers are invited to think critically about the social issues and ideas that are as much a part of modern American life as they are of modern American literature.