New Literary History of America (Harvard University Press Reference Library) - Hardcover

Marcus, Greil

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674035941 ISBN 13: 9780674035942

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Synopsis

America is a nation making itself up as it goes along. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, this book gives us a kaleidoscopic view of what 'Made in America' means.

About this title

Review:

A wildly informative, hugely entertaining and sometimes even revelatory book.--Jeff Simon"Buffalo News" (09/27/2009)

A DIY college course unto itself.--Anneli Rufus"East Bay Express" (11/25/2009)

An impressive achievement.--Jim Kiest"San Antonio Express-News" (12/13/2009)

Never fails to engross and edify.--Rodney Clapp"Christian Century" (01/12/2010)

It's weirdly inclusive (Is the Winchester Rifle really part of literary history?), but the big book has so many lively entries, on everything from hard-boiled fiction to New Journalism, that you can overlook its faults and enjoy its sweep.--Robert L. Pincus"San Diego Union-Tribune" (12/27/2009)

In snapshots of a few thousand words each, the entries in A New Literary History put on display the exploring, tinkering, and risk-taking that have contributed to the invention of America... A New Literary History of America gives us what amounts to a fractal geometry of American culture. You can focus on any one spot and get a sense of the whole or pull back and watch the larger patterns appear. What you see isn't the past so much as the present.-- (09/26/2009)

A New Literary History of America is not your typical Harvard University Press anthology...[It] roams far beyond any standard definition of literature. Aside from compositions that contain the written word, its subjects include war memorials, jazz, museums, comic strips, film, radio, musicals, skyscrapers, cybernetics and photography.-- (09/22/2009)

This magnificent volume is a vast, inquisitive, richly surprising and consistently enlightening wallow in our national history and culture...Neither reference nor criticism, neither history nor treatise, but a genre-defying, transcendent fusion of them all. It sounds impossible, but the result seems both inevitable and necessary and profoundly welcome, too...This book is not so much a history of our literature as it is a literary version of our history, told through the culture we've created to recount our past and conjure our future...In the age of Wikipedia, a reference book like this needs more than just the facts; it needs to tell us what the facts mean, and A New Literary History does just that.-- (09/22/2009)

Ambitious, thought-provoking, and comprehensive, A New Literary History of America edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, features more than 200 essays on poems, letters, novels, memoirs, speeches, movies, and theater, by writers ranging from Bharati Mukherjee to John Edgar Wideman, reinterpreting the American experience form the 1500s forward.--Elle (10/01/2009)

The huge, welcoming, exciting, just-published volume A New Literary History of America is a book with which to spend entire days and the rest of your life...Where else are you going to read Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, Mary Gaitskill on Norman Mailer, and Walter Mosley on the hardboiled detective novel? Don't you want to do that right now?...Talk about an all-American value: You could read this 1,000-plus-page book forever and never use up its revelations and its pleasures.-- (09/23/2009)

About the Author:

Greil Marcus is the author of Lipstick Traces, The Dustbin of History (both from Harvard), and The Shape of Things to Come, The Old, Weird America, Mystery Train, and other books. Werner Sollors is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• ISBN 10: 0674035941
• ISBN 13: 9780674035942
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 1000