Book Blurb
‘When it became clear that Columbus and other explorers had stumbled upon a fourth continent the whole map of human knowledge had to be redrawn, literally and metaphysically.
So writes Marcus Cunliffe introducing American Literature to 1900. This volume takes as a pragmatic starting-point the writings of the first European explorers such as the writings of the first European explorers such as Richard Hakluyt, and the first colonial settlers, such as Anne Bradstreet. By the mid nineteenth century the evolution of publishing and communications, and the advent of Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s had coincided with a flowering of talent—Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman—together with a host of minor figures. The essays in this volume explore three fertile centuries of writers and writing that drew on the Old World and the New, in shaping a distinctive native literature.
Published in ten volumes, The Penguin History of Literature is a superb critical survey of English and American literature covering fourteen centuries, from the Anglo-Saxons to the present, and written by some of the most distinguished academics in their fields.
This volume was previously published as part of the Sphere History of Literature series.
About the AuthorMarcus Falkner Cunliffe (1922–1990) was a British scholar who specialized in cultural and military American Studies. He was particularly interested in comparing how Europeans viewed Americans and how Americans viewed Europeans.
