This four-volume reference work surveys American literature from the early 20th century to the present day, featuring a diverse range of American works and authors and an expansive selection of primary source materials. Bringing useful and engaging material into the classroom, this four-volume set covers more than a century of American literary history—from 1900 to the present. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context profiles authors and their works and provides overviews of literary movements and genres through which readers will understand the historical, cultural, and political contexts that have shaped American writing. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context provides wide coverage of authors, works, genres, and movements that are emblematic of the diversity of modern America. Not only are major literary movements represented, such as the Beats, but this work also highlights the emergence and development of modern Native American literature, African American literature, and other representative groups that showcase the diversity of American letters. A rich selection of primary documents and background material provides indispensable information for student research.

The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry is designed to give readers a brief but thorough introduction to the various movements, schools, and groups of American poets in the twentieth century. It will help readers to understand and analyze modern and contemporary poems. The first part of the book deals with the transition from the nineteenth-century lyric to the modernist poem, focussing on the work of major modernists such as Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and W. C. Williams. In the second half of the book, the focus is on groups such as the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, the New Critics, the Confessionals, and the Beats. In each chapter, discussions of the most important poems are placed in the larger context of literary, cultural, and social history.

Mixed Media in Contemporary American Literature: Voices Gone Viral investigates the formation and formulation of the contemporary novel through a historical analysis of voice studies and media studies. After situating research through voices of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, this book examines the expressions of a multi-media vocality, examining the interactions among cultural polemics, aesthetic forms, and changing media in the twenty-first century. The novel studies shown here trace the ways in which the viral aesthetics of the contemporary novel move language out of context, recontextualizing human testimony by galvanizing mixed media forms that shape contemporary literature in our age of networks. Through readings of American authors such as Claudia Rankine, David Foster Wallace, Jennifer Egan, Junot Díaz, Michael Chabon, Joseph O’Neill, Michael Cunningham, and Colum McCann, the book considers how voice acts as a site where identities combine, conform, and are questioned relationally. By listening to and tracing the spoken and unspoken voices of the novel, the author identifies a politics of listening and speaking in our mediated, informational society.

The multi-volume Longman literature in English series aims to provide students of literature with a critical introduction to the major genres in their historical and cultural context. This book looks at cinema, painting and architecture in 20th-century America, as well as the culture of politics.

Most readers and critics view Mexican American writing as a subset of American literatureÑor at best as a stream running parallel to the main literary current. JosŽ Aranda now reexamines American literary history from the perspective of Chicano/a studies to show that Mexican Americans have had a key role in the literary output of the United States for one hundred fifty years. In this bold new look at the American canon, Aranda weaves the threads of Mexican American literature into the broader tapestry of Anglo American writing, especially its Puritan origins, by pointing out common ties that bind the two traditions: narratives of persecution, of immigration, and of communal crises, alongside chronicles of the promise of America. Examining texts ranging from Mar’a Amparo Ruiz de Burton's 1872 critique of the Civil War, Who Would Have Thought It?, through the contemporary autobiographies of Richard Rodriguez and Cherr’e Moraga, he surveys Mexican American history, politics, and literature, locating his analyses within the context of Chicano/a cultural criticism of the last four decades. When We Arrive integrates Early American Studies and Chicano/a Studies into a comparative cultural framework by using the Puritan connection to shed new light on dominant images of Chicano/a narrative, such as Aztl‡n and the borderlands. Aranda explores the influence of a nationalized Puritan ethos on nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers of Mexican descent, particularly upon constructions of ethnic identity and aesthetic values. He then frames the rise of contemporary Chicano/a literature within a critical body of work produced from the 1930s through the 1950s, one that combines a Puritan myth of origins with a literary history in which American literature is heralded as the product and producer of social and political dissent. Aranda's work is a virtual sourcebook of historical figures, texts, and ideas that revitalizes both Chicano/a studies and American literary history. By showing how a comparative study of two genres can produce a more integrated literary history for the United States, When We Arrive enables critics and readers alike to see Mexican American literature as part of a broader tradition and establishes for its writers a more deserving place in the American literary imagination.

Critical introduction to the contemporary american novel focusing on contexts, key texts and criticism.

First published between 1982 and 1983, this series examines the peculiarly American cultural context out of which the nation’s literature has developed. Covering the years from 1900 to 1930, this fourth volume of American Literature in Context focuses on how American literature dealt with the challenges of the period including the First World War and the stock market crash. It examines key writers of the time such as Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F Scott Fitzgerald and Eugene O’Neill who, unlike many Americans who sought escape, confronted reality, providing a rich and varied literature that reflects these turbulent years. This book will be of interest to those studying American literature and American studies.

Critical introductions to a range of literary topics and genres. The literature written by Americans during the twentieth century encompasses a wide variety of voices; voices that attempt to capture the breadth and diversity of American experience in a century of dizzying change. This book examines the dramatic social changes and political events - such as the Great Depression, American involvement in the Second World War and the civil rights movement - that helped to shape American writing throughout the century.

Twentieth-Century American Fiction in Circulation is a study of the twentieth-century linked story collection in the United States. It emphasizes how the fictional form grew out of an established publishing model—individual stories printed in magazines, revised and expanded into single-author volumes that resemble novels—which creates multiple contexts for the reception of this literature. By acknowledging the prior appearance of stories in periodicals, the book examines textual variants and the role of editorial emendation, drawing on archival records (drafts and correspondence) whenever possible. It also considers how the pages of magazines create a context for the reception of short stories that differs significantly from that of the single-author book. The chapters explore how short stories, appearing separately then linked together, excel at representing the discontinuity of modern American life; convey the multifaceted identity of a character across episodes; mimic the qualities of oral storytelling; and illustrate struggles of belonging within and across communities. The book explains the appearance and prevalence of these narrative strategies at particular cultural moments in the evolution of the American magazine, examining a range of periodicals such as The Masses, Saturday Evening Post, Partisan Review, Esquire, and Ladies’ Home Journal. The primary linked story collections studied are Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished (1938), Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps (1942), John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968), and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1988).