A History of American Literature by Richard Gray

A History of American Literature by Richard Gray

This major new history of American literature from pre-Columbian times to the present is written in an informed but accessible style by one of the leading authorities in the field. This is a major new one-volume history of American literature from pre-Columbian times to the present. It is extremely broad-ranging, taking in Native American, Anglo American, African American, Asian American and Hispanic American literature. This book: covers oral literature, folktales, spirituals, the blues, the western, the detective story, the thriller and science fiction, as well as canonical literature; relates the history of American literature to American social and cultural history; takes account of changes in critical and theoretical debates about literature in the last 30 years; and, is written by a leading international authority on American literature.

Richard Gray's real achievement is somehow to have compressed more than 400 years of thrillingly rich literary history between two coversLiterary Review Highly readable, jargon-free, and engaging. American Literary Scholarship This book is the first comprehensive, single volume history of American literature since The Columbia Literary History of the United States edited by Elliott Emory and published sixteen years ago. It is a puzzle, given the extraordinary interest in American literature at home and abroad, that so few full histories of American literature have been published. Consider the fact that the Columbia history arrived nearly four decades after R. E. Spiller's Literary History of the United States. What makes Gray's book so extraordinary is that it supercedes the Spiller and Emory texts in nearly every respect, and even challenges the supremacy of the titanic (this pun is intentional), multi-volume, still-evolving Cambridge History of American Literature. How Gray managed to so captivatingly capture the depth and breadth of so complex a literature in under a thousand pages is worth considering. [...] Richard Gray possesses the most balanced scholarship of the entire range of American literature I ever read. [...] This is the first history of American literature fully worthy of the multi-dimensionality of its subject. Norman Weinstein, Boise State University

Richard Gray is professor of literature at the University of Essex and editor of the Journal of American Studies. His books include Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region, The Literature of Memory: Modern Writers of the American South, and The Life of William Faulkner: A Critical Biography.