This fifth revised edition features approximately 1,900 items, most of which are annotated. It addresses several interdisciplinary studies that have become prominent in the last decade, especially on popular culture, racial and other minorities, Native Americans and Chicanos, and literary regionalism. It allots more space to computer aids, science fiction, children's literature, literature of the sea, film and literature, and linguistic studies of American English and includes a new section on psychology. The appendix lists the biography of each of 135 deceased American authors. ISBN 0-8223-0592-5 : $22.50 (For use only in the library).

The early years of American nationhood, beginning at the close of colonial rule and ending with the onset of the Civil War, saw both a young country and its literature grow in confidence and develop an awareness of self-identity. Pride in the new nation was a primary characteristic of much literary output in the early years of the country, whether in the form of fiction, poetry, drama, essay, travel writing, or journal. As the country grew and generations began to be born on the new land, Romanticism took hold, lauding not only the construct of the nation but also the natural power and potential of the country. This era of American literary expression has left behind a rich legacy of traditionally canonized authors, as well as material published in the growing periodical press that was of immediate importance to the population at the time. Literary Research and the Era of American Nationalism and Romanticism: Strategies and Sources examines the resources that deal with the literature produced in the approximately 70 years of antebellum American literature. Covering all formats, the volume discusses bibliographies, indexes, research guides, archives, special collections, microform, and digital primary text resources and how they are best utilized for a literary research project. Suggestions are offered for best practices for research while exploring a wide selection of resources that run the gamut from classic standards of American literary bibliography through contemporary open-access digital resources.

The essays in this pathbreaking collection consider the significance of varied early American fragmentary genres and practices—from diaries and poetry, to almanacs and commonplace books, to sermons and lists, to Indigenous ruins and other material shards and fragments—often overlooked by critics in a scholarly privileging of the “whole.” Contributors from literary studies, book history, and visual culture discuss a host of canonical and non-canonical figures, from Edward Taylor and Washington Irving to Mary Rowlandson and Sarah Kemble Knight, offering insight into the many intellectual, ideological, and material variations of “form” that populated the early American cultural landscape. As these essays reveal, the casting of the fragmentary as aesthetically eccentric or incomplete was a way of reckoning with concerns about the related fragmentation of nation, society, and self. For a contemporary audience, they offer new ways to think about the inevitable gaps and absences in our cultural and historical archive.

From the colonial era to the onset of the Civil War, Magazines and the Making of America looks at how magazines and the individuals, organizations, and circumstances they connected ushered America into the modern age. How did a magazine industry emerge in the United States, where there were once only amateur authors, clumsy technologies for production and distribution, and sparse reader demand? What legitimated magazines as they competed with other media, such as newspapers, books, and letters? And what role did magazines play in the integration or division of American society? From their first appearance in 1741, magazines brought together like-minded people, wherever they were located and whatever interests they shared. As America became socially differentiated, magazines engaged and empowered diverse communities of faith, purpose, and practice. Religious groups could distinguish themselves from others and demarcate their identities. Social-reform movements could energize activists across the country to push for change. People in specialized occupations could meet and learn from one another to improve their practices. Magazines built translocal communities—collections of people with common interests who were geographically dispersed and could not easily meet face-to-face. By supporting communities that crossed various axes of social structure, magazines also fostered pluralistic integration. Looking at the important role that magazines had in mediating and sustaining critical debates and diverse groups of people, Magazines and the Making of America considers how these print publications helped construct a distinctly American society.

"Recommended for academic and public reference collections." Choice

Hume's Reception in Early America: Expanded Edition brings together the original American responses to one of Britain's greatest men of letters, David Hume. Now available as a single volume paperback, this new edition includes updated further readings suggestions and dozens of additional primary sources gathered together in a completely new concluding section. From complete pamphlets and booklets, to poems, reviews, and letters, to extracts from newspapers, religious magazines and literary and political journals, this book's contents come from a wide variety of sources published in colonial America and the early United States between 1758 and 1850. As well as classics by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, it contains scores of unknown and hard-to-locate items, many of which have not been reprinted since their original publication. These responses are divided into four parts covering Hume's Essays; his Philosophical Writings; his History of England; and his Character and Death. Each of those parts has a separate introductory essay, and every selection is introduced by a short headnote that sets the piece in its historical context and provides bibliographical references. Packed with new insights into Hume and American thought and culture, Hume's Reception in Early America reveals the relevance and impact of Hume on American political, philosophical, historical, religious, and aesthetic debates.

This is a comprehensive 1997 account of the history of literary criticism in Britain and Europe between 1660 and 1800. Unlike previous histories, it is not just a chronological survey of critical writing, but a multidisciplinary investigation of how the understanding of literature and its various genres was transformed, at the start of the modern era, by developments in philosophy, psychology, the natural sciences, linguistics, and other disciplines, as well as in society at large. In the process, modern literary theory - at first often implicit in literary texts themselves - emancipated itself from classical poetics and rhetoric, and literary criticism emerged as a full-time professional activity catering for an expanding literate public. The volume is international both in coverage and in authorship. Extensive bibliographies provide guidance for further specialised study.

Cecilia, a fifteenth-century Christian martyr, has long been considered the patron saint of music. In this pathbreaking volume, ten of the best known scholars in the newly emerging field of feminist musicology explore both how gender has helped shape genres and works of music and how music has contributed to prevailing notions of gender. The musical subjects include concert music, both instrumental and vocal, and the vernacular genres of ballads, salon music, and contemporary African American rap. The essays raise issues not only of gender but also of race and class, moving among musical practices of the courtly ruling class and the elite discourse of the twentieth-century modernist movement to practices surrounding marginal girls in Renaissance Venice and the largely white middle-class experiences of magazine and balladry.