Lectures on American Literature

The first edition of this book, published in 2002, aimed to complete the study material for our students of American literature. The third edition strives to emphasize this aspect while expanding and deepening the general overview as well as including other important movements and authors. The exposition of the 20th century underwent major changes: the scholars added new texts while supplementing the older ones to comply with the development of critical and academic approaches. The book is written to the point and in comprehensible language, corresponding with the ambition to present and explain the development of one of the most interesting world literatures to university students.

Note on third edition Justin Quinn
Introduction Martin Procházka

AMERICAN LITERATURE: BEGINNINGS TO 1914
Martin Procházka, David Robbins

1. Historical Influences & Distinctive Features
Alien Reality of the New World
Religious Dissent
Polycentrism
Multiculturalism and Ethnicity

2. Periodization of American Literature

3. Earliest Monuments of American Literature
Introduction
General History of Virginia
Of Plymouth Plantation

4. The Shaping of the Puritan Self
Introduction
John Cotton and Antinomianism
Poetry and Private Life: Anne Bradstreet
Survival and Damnation: Rowlandson and Wigglesworth
Triumphs and Traps of Baroque Sensibility: Taylor and Cotton Mather

5. The Eighteenth Century: The Great Awakenings & the Enlightenment
Introduction
Jonathan Edwards
First and Second Great Awakenings
Benjamin Franklin

6. Revolution & the Early Republic
Introduction
Declarations of Independence
Revolution and Religion
The Republic of Letters
American Utopias
American Utopias and Voluntary Association
Colonial Times in Retrospect

7. Inventing the Indians: Bryant, Cooper, Simms & Longfellow
Introduction
William Cullen Bryant
James Fenimore Cooper
Simms & Longfellow

8. American Gothic: Brockden Brown & Poe
Introduction
Charles Brocken Brown
Edgar Allan Poe

9. American Transcendentalism: Emerson & Thoreau
Introduction
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henry David Thoreau

10. Late Romanticism: Hawthorne & Melville
Introduction
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Herman Melville

11. The Birth of Modern Poetry: Whitman & Dickinson
Introduction
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson

12. Mark Twain, the Tall Tale & Local Color
Introduction
Mark Twain
Other Local Color
13. Fictions of Realism and Consciousness: Howells & the James Brothers
Introduction
William Dean Howells
Henry James
William James

14. Naturalism
Introduction
Henry Adams
Frank Norris
Stephen Crane
Theodore Dreiser
Jack London

15. Abolitionism & African-American Literature from Beginnings through the Harlem Renaissance
Introduction
Abolitionism
Frederick Douglass
Washington and Du Bois
Harlem Renaissance

16. Women's Literature before World War I
Introduction
Margaret Fuller
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Gilman and Others
Chopin and Cather Edith Wharton

17. Works Cited Beginnings to 1914
Abbreviations
Primary
Secondary

TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Justin Quinn, Erik S. Roraback, Hana Ulmanová, Pavla Veselá, Clare Wallace

18. Modernism, 1910-1930
Introduction
Theater
Tendencies in American Theater at the Turn of the Century
The New Stagecraft and the Little Theatres
The Washington Square Plays and the Theatre Guild
The Provincetown Players
Eugene O'Neill
American Modernism on Stage
Prose Fiction
Ernest Hemingway and the Consequences of War
The Lost Generation and F. Scott Fitzgerald
Willa Cather
Sinclair Lewis
Poetry
Rupture and Continuity
Ezra Pound and Imagism
The Cantos
L S. Eliot
Eliot's Later Poetry and Criticism
Robert Frost
Hart Crane

19. The Political Turn, 1930-1945
Introduction
Popular Culture, Beginnings to 1945
Theater
Theater at a Time of Crisis
The Group Theatre (1931-1940)
The Federal Theatre Project (1935-1939)
Playwrights of the 1930s and Early '40s
War and the Costs of Political Allegiance
Poetry
Periodization
Marianne Moore
William Carlos Williams
Wallace Stevens
Prose Fiction
William Faulkner and Southern Literature
Social Themes
John Steinbeck
Nathanael West
Henry Roth
Zora Neale Hurston

20. Explosion, 1945-1970
Introduction
Popular Culture
Theater
Postwar and Cold War Contexts
Playwrights of the Late 1940s and 1950s
Alternative Energies of the 1960s
New Playwrights of the 1960s
Prose Fiction
Southern Literature
Jewish-American Literature
African-American Prose
The Beat Generation
John Updike and Small Town America
Poetry
The New Critical Style
Robert Lowell
Sylvia Plath
Elizabeth Bishop
James Merrill
John Ashbery
Adrienne Rich

21. Aftermath, 1970-2000
Introduction
Popular Culture
Theater
Disillusionment and the New Conservatism, 1970-1989
Political and Experimental Theater of the 1970s
The Drama of American Masculinity
Drama, Performance, and Diversity: The 1980s and After
Prose Fiction
The Expanse of History
African-American Fiction
Multiculturalism
Fiction after Feminism
Dirty Realism and Beyond
Postmodernism and the Return of Realism
Poetry
The Disappearing Mainstream
Formalism and Beyond
Robert Pinsky
Jorie Graham
Reginald Shepherd and New Lyricism

22. Works Cited Twentieth Century