A Brief History Of American Literature

• A Brief History of American Literature offers students and general readers a concise and up-to-date history of the full range of American writing from its origins until the present day. 
• Represents the only up-to-date concise history of American literature 
• Covers fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction, as well as looking at other forms of literature including folktales, spirituals, the detective story, the thriller and science fiction
• Considers how our understanding of American literature has changed over the past twenty years
• Offers students an abridged version of History of American Literature, a book widely considered the standard survey text 
• Provides an invaluable introduction to the subject for students of American literature, American studies and all those interested in the literature and culture of the United States

Richard Gray is Professor of Literature at the University of Essex and former Distinguished Visiting Professor at a number of universities in the United States. He is the first specialist in American literature to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy and has published over a dozen books on the topic, including the award-winning Writing the South (Ideas of an American Region (1986) and The Life of William Faulkner: A Critical Biography (1944).  His History of American Literature is widely considered to be one of the standard works on the subject.

Preface and Acknowledgments.

1 The First Americans: American Literature During the Colonial and Revolutionary Periods.

Imagining Eden.

Writing of the Colonial and Revolutionary Periods.

2 Inventing Americas: The Making of American Literature 1800–1865.

Making a Nation.

The Making of American Myths.

The Making of American Selves.

The Making of Many Americas.

The Making of an American Fiction and Poetry.

3 Reconstructing the Past, Reimagining the Future: The Development of American Literature 1865–1900.

Rebuilding a Nation.

The Development of Literary Regionalisms.

The Development of Literary Realism and Naturalism.

The Development of Women's Writing.

The Development of Many Americas.

4 Making It New: The Emergence of Modern American Literature 1900–1945.

Changing National Identities.

Between Victorianism and Modernism.

The Inventions of Modernism.

Traditionalism, Politics, and Prophecy.

Community and Identity.

Mass Culture and the Writer.

5 Negotiating the American Century: American Literature since 1945.

Towards a Transnational Nation.

Formalists and Confessionals.

Public and Private Histories.

Beats, Prophets, and Aesthetes.

The Art and Politics of Race.

Realism and Its Discontents.

Language and Genre.

Creating New Americas.

Index.