From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature - Softcover

Bradbury, Malcolm; Ruland, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140144358 ISBN 13: 9780140144352

Publisher: Penguin, 1993

Synopsis

From a Modernist/Postmodernist perspective, this addresses questions of literary and cultural nationalism. The authors reveal that since the seventeenth century, American writing has reflected the political and historical climate of its time and helped define America's cultural and social parameters.Aboe all they argue that American literature has always been essentially "modern", illustrating this with a broad range of texts: from Poe and Melville to fitzgerald and Proud, to Wallace and Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Thomas Pynchon.

About this title

Review

"Rarely has the national literature been made to cohere so convincingly: Ruland and Bradbury proceed smoothly from writer to writer, at every turn drawing illuminating connections...An elegant book."
The Washington Post

"Highly informative...a map of American literature that puts every writer in place."
The New York Times

"This is an excellent and readable survey of nearly 300 years of American writing and literary criticism in a flowing style that shows no signs of the tremendous concentration of information. Sure to become a classic; for general and special literature collections."
Library Journal

"...a sound, balanced account of how American writers created works that reflected a new nation with new experience, a new science and a new politics on a new continent,...this is a comprehensive, often vibrant history of how American writers declared independence from older European forms before making their own unique contributions to world literature."
Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

Malcolm Bradbury was a novelist, critic, television dramatist and Emeritus Professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia. He is author of the novels Eating People Is Wrong (1959); Stepping Westward (1965); The History Man (1975), which won the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize and was adapted as a famous television series; Rates of Exchange (1983), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Cuts: A Very Short Novel (1987), also televised; and Doctor Criminale (1992).His critical works include The Modern American Novel (1984; revised edition, 1992), No, Not Bloomsbury (essays, 1987), The Modern World: Ten Great Writers (1988), The Modern British Novel (1993) and Dangerous Pilgrimages (1995).He has also edited Modernism (with James McFarlane, 1976), The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories (1988) and The Atlas of Literature (1997). He is the author of a collection of seven stories and nine parodies, entitled Who Do You Think You Are? (1976), and of several works of humour and satire, including Why Come to Slaka? (1986), Unsent Letters (1988; revised edition, 1995) and Mensonge (1987). Many of his books are published by Penguin. In addition, he has written many television plays and the television 'novels' The Gravy Train and The Gravy Train Goes East. He has also adapted several television series, including Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue, Kingsley Amis's The Green Man and Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm.Malcolm Bradbury was awarded the CBE in 1991 and died in 2000.

Richard Ruland is Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0140144358
• ISBN 13: 9780140144352
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 480