American Literature 1-3. [antikvár]

preface this account of American literature attempts to describe and interpret American writing in relation to the characters and personal circumstances of the men who wrote it and to the social and political tendencies which conditioned their writing. It assumes that a work's meaning is not all contained in its form and its specific content, but includes also its significant reference to things going on outside of it when it was written. Although I mistrust any and every simple theory of interpretation of a national literature, I have a "theory of American literature" which establishes a somewhat tenuous continuity in this book: that most American writing has been either the expression of the provincial ideas of New England and the Old South (very little of it was actually produced by the South, however), or the expression of a search for a more inclusive national idea in the writings of authors from the Middle States and the West. This is neither a very original nor a very stringent thesis, nor is it meant to be—its very looseness is what recommends it, besides the fact that I think it is true. The reader is notified that my estimate of a writer's relative importance is not indicated by the amount of space I have given to comment on his work. How much a writer wrote, and how much explication is necessary, have determined how many pages I have devoted to any particular writer. These volumes are a part of Barron's Educational Series, and the reader who desires a continuation of the survey of American literature from Henry James to the present time is referred to a complementary volume of the Series, Recent American Literature, by Professor Donald Heiney. Darret Abel April, 1962