Encyclopedia of
American Literature
Literature & the Arts
Steven R. Serafin, General Editor
Alfred Bendixen,
Associate Editor
http://www.continuum-books.com/litartd2.htm#American
Double column Large format (7 inches by 10 inches)
1300 pp 0-8264-1052-9 $150.00 hbd
Introduction
From John Smith to Jack Kerouac, Cotton Mather to Toni Morrison,
Edgar Allan Poe to Stephen King, Francis Parkman to
Alex Haley, the story of American literature is really many
stories—of ancient indigenous peoples, early settlers, men
and
women enslaved and liberated, war and peace, and immigrants
seeking better lives. Our multifaceted literary heritage reflects
our
deepest spiritual and material consciousness: rooted and
rootless, rural and urban, timeless and ever-changing. Through a
living
literature, we come to learn our own orientations, aspirations,
and worldviews: where we have come from and where we may be
going.
Ten years in the making, this comprehensive single-volume
literary survey is for the scholar, student, and general reader.
The Encyclopedia of American
Literature represents a collaborative effort, involving 300
contributors from across the United States and Canada. Composed
of more than 1,100 signed
biographical-critical entries, this Encyclopedia serves as both
guide and companion to the study and appreciation of American
literature.
Wherever possible, references to authors of merit who do not
receive individual articles are incorporated into the text of the
most relevant topical essay. All topical
and biographical-critical entries are cross-referenced and linked
to the index. Select bibliographical material is included in most
articles. Through American literature,
we discover the imaginative and artistic expression of a
multiplicity of people united by nationality, diversified by
ethnicity and cultural identity, religion, social and
economic class, political conviction, region. This Encyclopedia
serves as a useful reference work and may itself be considered a
lasting contribution to American
literature.
1,100 original, signed biographical-critical articles by leading
scholars:
Faith Berry, David Castronovo, Josephine Donovan, D. C. Greetham,
Peter L. Hays, Robert F. Kiernan, Arthur F. Kinney, David Kirby,
Felicia H. Londré, Donald
E. Pease, Arnold Rampersad, John T. Shawcross, Martha Nell Smith,
Martin Tucker, Lewis Turco, and Edward Wagenknecht—300
contributors in all.
70 topic articles, including major genres:
Abolitionism
Drama
Latino/a Literature
Poetry
The Supernatural
African American Literature
The Epic
Lesbian Literature
Politics and Literature
The Tall Tale
Almanacs and Yearbooks
The Essay
Literary Criticism Before 1914
The Prose Poem
Textual Criticism
American Adam
Expatriates
Literary Criticism Since 1914
Puritanism
Transcendentalism
Asian American Literature
Feminism and Women’s Writing
Literary Journalism
Realism
Utopia
Autobiography
Film and Literature
Literary Prizes & Awards
Regionalism
War
Biography
Folklore
Literary Publishing: Books
Religion and Literature
The West
Canada
The Fugitives/Agrarians
The Midwest
Science and Literature
The Western
Children’s Literature
Gay Male Literature
Modernism
Science Fiction
Young Adult Literature
The City and Literature
History and Literature
Nationalism
The Sea
The Confidence Man
Humor
Native American Literature
Sentimentality
Counterculture and Literature
Imagism
Naturalism
The Short Story
Cubism
Indian Captivity Narrative
Nature and Landscape
The Slave Narrative
The Detective Story
Jewish American Literature
New England
The South
Discovery and Exploration
Language and Dialect
The Orient
Sports and American Literature
Comprehensive index to authors and subjects.
From the Introduction
“From the earliest storyteller to the most recent, the
historian and biographer to the poet and novelist, the ‘making’
of American literature is in effect the story of its
‘makers’: Puritan visionaries such as William Bradford
and Increase and Cotton Mather; voices of creative intuition such
as Anne Bradstreet, Royall Tyler, and
Phillis Wheatley; masters of the American Renaissance—Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry David Thoreau,
Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman; realists and
naturalists—William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Edith
Wharton; Stephen Crane, Frank
Norris, and Jack London; writers of the Harlem Renaissance such
as Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Richard
Wright; modernists such as
Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Eugene O’Neill, Robert Frost,
William Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams;
writers of the Lost Generation—Gertrude
Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway; Beat writers—Allen
Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Gary
Snyder, Kenneth
Rexroth; the Black Mountain school—Charles Olson, Denise
Levertov, Robert Duncan, Paul Blackburn, Robert Creeley, and Ed
Dorn; the New York
school—Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, James
Schuyler, Barbara Guest; postmodernists from Donald Barthelme,
Ishmael Reed, John Hawkes,
Robert Coover, and Thomas Pynchon to Kathy Acker, Richard Powers,
and William Gibson.”—From the Introduction by Steven R.
Serafin
About the Editors
Steven R. Serafin, General Editor, is a leading authority on
modern world literature. He is general editor of the new edition
of the Encyclopedia of World
Literature in the 20th Century, as well as editor of the
supplement to Modern Black Writers and the Dictionary of Literary
Biography series on American and
British literary biographers. He is also, with Chukwuma Azuonye,
the coeditor of The Columbia Anthology of African Literature. Dr.
Serafin lives in New York
City, where he is affiliated with Hunter College of The City
University of New York. Alfred Bendixen, Associate Editor, is a
professor of English, California State
University. He is the editor of Haunted Women: The Best
Supernatural Tales by American Women Writers, The Whole Family: A
Novel by Twelve Authors, as
well as other works, and is the founder of the American
Literature Association.
Reviews
“This hefty one-volume encyclopedia, produced by Serafin,
the editor of the on-going Dictionary of Literary Biography, and
Bendixen, the founder of the
American Literature Association, takes a different approach to
the subject than other one-volume encyclopedias currently
available. While the Oxford Companion to
American Literature (LJ 7/83), now in its sixth edition, and to a
lesser extent Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of American
Literature (LJ 1/92) attempt to cover
the topic exhaustively with mostly short, factual entries
focusing on individual works, characters, and organizations, this
new work takes a more selective view.
Because the book starts with the notion that American literature
is best explained through stories of its writers, the vast
majority of the book’s 1100 entries are about
authors. Only 70 articles cover topics such as the major genres
(drama, mystery, poetry, science fiction, the short story),
ethnic and regional literatures, and religion.
The editors selected those authors whose work represents the
development of American literature from the Colonial period to
the present, balancing authors with
international reputations against important but lesser-known
regional and ethnic writers. Signed by one of 300 contributors,
the entries include full names, dates,
places of birth and death, a long original essay, and a
bibliography. The essays are lengthy and interpretive, relating
the author’s work to its context. This will be of
great use to students and general readers alike. With its
concentration on authors and fewer, longer articles, much of this
book’s ready-reference value will depend on
its index, which was not seen by this reviewer. A wise purchase
as an update and complement to the Oxford Companion.”—Library
Journal
info@continuum-books.com 212-953-5944 212-953-5858
The Continuum Publishing Company, 370 Lexington Avenue, New York,
NY 10017-6503
____
October 10, 1999