Knowing that the Cape is more than tourist-riddled beaches and overpriced ice cream, Michael Thurston takes us on a late-summer retread of one of Thoreau's most famous walks. Blending travel writing and literary criticism, Thurston takes us along two centuries of the shore, reconsidering the dreadful shipwreck of the St. John, and considering the pliability of a hand-painted postcard. From artists like Joel Meyerwitz and Edward Hopper, to statesman John Hay and cinematographer Robert Richa...

One hundred years after the publication of his first major work, Ernest Hemingway remains an important author. His work addressed the search for meaning in the wake of a 'Great War' and amid the challenges of rapidly changing social conventions, and his prose style has influenced generations of journalists and writers. Hemingway was wounded on the battlefield and caught up throughout his life in conflicting desires. He was also a deeply committed artist, a restless experimenter with the el...

“Poetry makes nothing happen,” wrote W. H. Auden in 1939, expressing a belief that came to dominate American literary institutions in the late 1940s — the idea that good poetry cannot, and should not, be politically engaged. By contrast, Michael Thurston here looks back to the 1920s and 1930s to a generation of poets who wrote with the precise hope and the deep conviction that they would move their audiences to action. He offers an engaging new look at the political poetry of Edwin Rolfe, ...

Drawing on a variety of interdisciplinary debates in cultural studies and contemporary theory, Modernism, Inc. provides a new look at the relationship between modernism and postmodernism within the critical frame of twentieth-century American culture.Organized around the idea of "incorporation"--embodiment, repressed memory, and advanced capitalism--Modernism, Inc. covers a wide range of topics: Josephine Baker's "hot house style"; the president's p...

ON THE QUAY AT SMYRNA narrates in awful detail the violence and suffering wrought by the Turks during the Greco-Turkish War, seen primarily through the eyes of a teenage girl. It conveys the vibrant sights and smells, the sounds and tastes, the daily routines—with all their tedium and richness—that characterized the lives of its inhabitants from the days before the city's sacking. Margot Demopoulos tells the story of Penelope, the adolescent daughter of a Greek Smyrniot banker and a mother...

New York holds a special place in America's national mythology as both the gateway to the USA and as a diverse, vibrant cultural center distinct from the rest of the nation. From the international atmosphere of the Dutch colony New Amsterdam, through the expansion of the city in the nineteenth century, to its unique appeal to artists and writers in the twentieth, New York has given its writers a unique perspective on American culture. This Companion explores the range of writing and perfor...

From James Agee to W. G. Sebald, there has been an explosion of modern documentary narratives and fiction combining text and photography in complex and fascinating ways. However, these contemporary experiments are part of a tradition that stretches back to the early years of photography. Writers have been integrating photographs into their work for as long as photographs have existed, producing rich, multilayered creations; and photographers have always made images that incorporate, respon...

A compelling intellectual and literary history of midcentury AmericaIn a midcentury American cultural episode forgotten today, intellectuals of all schools shared a belief that human nature was under threat. The immediate result was a glut of dense, abstract books on the "nature of man." But the dawning "age of the crisis of man," as Mark Greif calls it, was far more than a historical curiosity. In this ambitious intellectual and literary history, Greif recovers th...

The most celebrated American novelist of the past half-century, an indispensable figure of postmodernism worldwide, Thomas Pynchon notoriously challenges his readers. This Companion provides tools for meeting that challenge. Comprehensive, accessible, lively, up-to-date and reliable, it approaches Pynchon's fiction from various angles, calling on the expertise of an international roster of scholars at the cutting edge of Pynchon studies. Part I covers Pynchon's fiction novel-by-novel from ...

A "smart and fascinating" reassessment of postwar American culture and the politics of the 1960s from the author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture ( Reason Magazine).We tend to think of the sixties as an explosion of creative energy and freedom that arose in direct revolt against the social restraint and authoritarian hierarchy of the early Cold War years. Yet, as Fred Turner reveals in The Democratic Surround, the decades that brough...

During and just after World War II, an influential group of American writers and intellectuals projected a vision for literature that would save the free world. Novels, stories, plays, and poems, they believed, could inoculate weak minds against simplistic totalitarian ideologies, heal the spiritual wounds of global catastrophe, and just maybe prevent the like from happening again. As the Cold War began, high-minded and well-intentioned scholars, critics, and writers from across the politi...

Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) is one of the most violent and revolutionary works in the American canon. Controversial and compelling, its account of crime and racism remain the source of profound disagreement both within African-American culture and throughout the world.This guide to Wright's provocative novel offers:an accessible introduction to the text and contexts of Native Sona critical history, surveying the many interp...