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From Puritanism to Postmodernism

From Puritanism to Postmodernism

A History of American Literature

About the Book

From Modernist/Postmodernist perspective, leading critics Richard Ruland (American) and Malcolm Bradbury (British) address questions of literary and cultural nationalism. They demonstrate that since the seventeenth century, American writing has reflected the political and historical climate of its time and helped define America's cultural and social parameters. Above all, they argue that American literature has always been essentially "modern," illustrating this with a broad range of texts: from Poe and Melville to Fitzgerald and Pound, to Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Thomas Pynchon.

From Puritanism to Postmodernism pays homage to the luxuriance of American writing by tracing the creation of a national literature that retained its deep roots in European culture while striving to achieve cultural independence.

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About the Author

Malcolm Bradbury
Malcolm Bradbury was a novelist, critic, television dramatist, and professor of American studies at the University of East Anglia, where he cofounded the first and most prestigious master’s program  in creative writing in the United Kingdom. Some of his novels include Eating People Is Wrong, The History Man, and To the Hermitage. He also wrote a number of critical works, humor and satire, and adapted Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man and Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm for television. He was knighted in 2000 and died in November of the same year. More by Malcolm Bradbury
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About the Author

Richard Ruland
Malcolm Bradbury was a novelist, critic, television dramatist, and professor of American studies at the University of East Anglia, where he cofounded the first and most prestigious master’s program  in creative writing in the United Kingdom. Some of his novels include Eating People Is Wrong, The History Man, and To the Hermitage. He also wrote a number of critical works, humor and satire, and adapted Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man and Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm for television. He was knighted in 2000 and died in November of the same year. More by Richard Ruland
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