please recommend me a volume on american literary history

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A primer of sorts to connect the dots between John Winthrop and Kathy Acker, if such exists.

Nothing too academic. Just to bone up on trivia and whatnot, and be better able to contextualize, say, Joyce Carol Oates in terms of Herman Melville, Gerald Vizenor in terms of Mark Twain, Twain in terms of Melville, Oates in terms of Twain, and so on and so forth, but without opaque theory fogging up the jigsaw.

I'm thinking of something as cumpulsively readable as Stephen Coote's breezy 1993 survey The Penguin Short History of English Literature, if that helps.

Thanks.

― tippecanoe, Sunday, 19 June 2005 18:30 (twenty-one years ago)

two weeks pass...

I know it's not exactly what you're asking for, but I'd recommend the sixth edition"The Oxford Companion to American Literature" by James D. Hart and Phillip Leininger. It's a little dated, but it gives good, readable entries on the breadth of American lit (and leaves it up to the reader to do the dot-connecting).

― Mark Klobas, Friday, 8 July 2005 12:44 (twenty years ago)

Rozakis, Laurie.
The complete idiot's guide to American literature.
New York : Alpha ; Hemel Hempstead : Prentice Hall, 1999.

DON'T YOU LOVE THESE "IDIOT" TITLES!

Blair, Walter, 1900-
american literature, a brief history.
Scott, Foresman [1964]

American literature
Skipp, Francis E.
New York : Barron's, c1992.

― Mr. Jaggers, Friday, 15 July 2005 21:57 (twenty years ago)

seven years pass...

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=1823&fulltext=1&media=#article-text-cutpoint

Gura’s book is an intentional revival of a 1940s-style literary history. The format is encyclopedic, combining short biographies of novelists with summaries of their most important novels, allowing for coverage of a remarkable variety of novels and writers — most of them entirely neglected by general readers. The result is nostalgic, inclusive, and a lot of fun. Packed with information about all the weird and wonderful 19th-century novels Americans have never read, Gura calls upon a national reading public to remember its upbringing in the liberal arts and return to “consciousness.” The project is appealing: Truth’s Ragged Edge not only provides a uniquely retro (19th century) summer reading list, it issues a direct challenge to American readers — to try to remember what consciousness is.

― j., Sunday, 7 July 2013 04:37 (twelve years ago)

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