American Trajectories: Authors and Readings 1790-1970

By Warner Berthoff and Werner Berthoff

Book Overview

In American Trajectories Warner Berthoff argues that even in the broadest cultural and historical perspective, imaginative literature (like all the arts) is a matter of individual signatures and differences, but that there are also recognizable patterns and continuities marking off what is distinctively American, what both reflects and speaks for a shared national experience. Discussions of Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain, Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, Kate Chopin, Theodore Dreiser, and Edmund Wilson, focus on the provenance and central character of writing by mainstream figures in our literary past. The essays on Brockden Brown, Nathan Asch, O. Henry, Frank O'Hara, Lewis Mumford and Van Wyck Brooks take up marginal, neglected, forgotten, or not yet fully acknowledged contributors to American writing.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0271026170
• ISBN13: 9780271026176
• Release Date: April 1994
• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"