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.

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 liter ary 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 intel'|ectual, and the aesthetic-and demonstrates a richer concept of authority in literary studies than is found in earlier accounts.

List of illustrations                    

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

THE AMERICAN LITERARY FIELD, 1860-189o Richard H. Brodhead, Yale University

  The American literary field, 1860-1890 LITERARY FORMS AND MASS CULTURE, 1870-1920 Nancy Bentley, University of Penno'lvania

 1 Museum Realism

 2 Howells, James, and the republic of letters

 3 Women and Realist authorship

 4 Chesnutt and imperial spectacle

 5 Wharton, travel, and modernity

 6 Adams, James, Du Bois, and social thought

PROMISES OF AMERICAN LIFE, 1880--1920 Walter Benn Michae/s, University of Illinois, Chicago

 1 An American tragedy, or the promise of American life

 2 The production of visibility

 3 The contracted heart

 4 Success

BECOMING MULTICULTURAL: CULTURE, ECONOMY, ANDTHE NOVEL, 1860-1920 Susan L. Mizruchi, Boston University

 1 Introduction

 2 Remembering civil war

 3 Social death and the reconstruction of slavery

 4 Cosmopolitan variations

 5 Native-American sacrifice in an age of progress

 6 Marketing culture

 7 Varieties of work

 8 Corporate America

 9 Realist utopias

Chronology

Bibliography

Index