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 these
myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American
experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new
American history.
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. Literature, music, film, art,
history, science, philosophy, political rhetoric--cultural creations
of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and
place that give them shape.
The
meeting of minds is extraordinary as T. J. Clark writes on Jackson
Pollock, Paul Muldoon on Carl Sandburg, Camille Paglia on Tennessee
Williams, Sarah Vowell on Grant Wood's American Gothic, Walter Mosley
on hard-boiled detective fiction, Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison,
Gerald Early on Tarzan, Bharati Mukherjee on The Scarlet Letter, Gish
Jen on Catcher in the Rye, and Ishmael Reed on Huckleberry Finn. From
Anne Bradstreet and John Winthrop to Philip Roth and Toni Morrison,
from Alexander Graham Bell and Stephen Foster to Alcoholics
Anonymous, Life, Chuck Berry, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ronald Reagan,
this is