Volume Seven of the History examines a broad range of American literature of the past half-century, revealing complex relations to changes in society. Christopher Bigsby discusses American dramatists from Tennessee Williams to August Wilson,showing how innovations in theater anticipated a world of emerging countercultures and provided America with an alternative view of contemporary life.Morris Dickstein describes the condition of rebellion in fiction from 1940 to 1970,linking writers as diverse as James Baldwin and John Updike to uncover complexities of identity, heroism, and nostalgia. John Burt turns his eye to the writers of the American South, describing the tensions between modernization and renewal, and continued entanglements with the specter of the past ...

The Cambridge History of American Literature addresses the broad spectrum of new and established directions in all branches of American writing and includes the work of scholars and critics who have shaped, and who continue to shape, what has become a major area of literary scholarship. The authors span three decades of achievement in American literary criticism, thereby speaking for the continuities as well as the disruptions sustained between generations of scholarship. Generously proportioned narratives allow at once for a broader vision and sweep of American literary history than has been possible previously, and while the voice of traditional criticism forms a background for these narratives, it joins forces with the diversity of interests that characterize contemporary literary studies.

The History offers wide-ranging,interdisciplinary accounts of American genres and periods. Generated partly by the recent unearthing of previously neglected texts, the expansion of material in American literature coincides with a dramatic increase in the number and variety of approaches to that material. The multifaceted scholarly and critical enterprise embodied in The Cambridge History of American Literature addresses these multiplicities - the social,the cultural, the intellectual, and the aesthetic - and demonstrates a richer concept of authority in literary studies than is found in earlier accounts.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

THE DRAMA 1940--1990

Christopher Bigsby, University of East Anglia

1 Introduction

2 Tennessee Williams

3 Arthur Miller

4 Edward Albee

5 Sam Shepard

6 David Mamet

7 Changing America: A Changing Drama?

FICTION AND SOCIETY, 194o-1970

Morris Dickstein, Graduate Center, City University of New York

1 War and the Novel: From World War II to Vietnam

2 The New Fiction: From the Home Front to the i95os

3 On and Off the Road: The Outsider as Young Rebel

4 Apocalypse Now: A Literature of Extremes

AFTER THE SOUTHERN RENASCENCE

John Burr, Brandeis University

1 Introduction

2 Robert Penn Warren

3 Carson McCullers

4 Flannery O'Connor

5 Eudora Welty

6 Novels of Race and Class

7 Novels of Slavery and Reconstruction

8 Walker Percy

9 Reynolds Price

1O Peter Taylor

POSTMODERN FICTIONS, 1970--199O

Wendy Steiner, University of Pennsylvania

1 Rethinking Postmodernism

2 Fables of the Fetish

3 The End of Traditionalism

4 Women's Fiction: The Rewriting of History

5 Conclusion

EMERGENT LITERATURES

Cyrus R. K. Patell, New York University

1 From Marginal to Emergent

2 Comparative Racism and the Logic of Naturalization

3 Nisei Sons and Daughters

4 Legacies of the Sixties

5 Refusing to Go Straight

6 Beyond Hybridity

Appendix: Biographies

Chronology, 1940-1990

Bibliography

Index