Volume Two of the History presents a comprehensive new account of the American Renaissance, exploring the ways in which diversity, considered in its various forms - as complimentarity, heterogeneity, contention,and conflict - becomes both subject and substance of the narrative. Michael Davitt Bell describes the social conditions of the literary vocation: the reciprocities among authorship,economic change, gender distinction, and regional interest that shaped the growth of a professional literature in the United States.Eric Sundquist interweaves disparate voices,outlooks, and traditions in a reading of the broad cultural patterns revealed by the writings of slavery and the frontier ...

The Cambridge History of American Literature addresses the broad spectrum of new and established directions in all branches of American writing and includes the work of scholars and critics who have shaped, and who continue to shape, what has become a major area of literary scholarship. The authors span three decades of achievement in American literary criticism, thereby speaking for the continuities as well as the disruptions sustained between generations of scholarship. Generously proportioned narratives allow at once for a broader vision and sweep of American literary history than has been possible previously, and while the voice of traditional criticism forms a background for these narratives, it joins forces with the diversity of interests that characterize contemporary literary studies.

The History offers wide-ranging,interdisciplinary accounts of American genres and periods. Generated partly by the recent unearthing of previously neglected texts, the expansion of material in American literature coincides with a dramatic increase in the number and variety of approaches to that material. The multifaceted scholarly and critical enterprise embodied in The Cambridge History of American Literature addresses these multiplicities - the social,the cultural, the intellectual, and the aesthetic - and demonstrates a richer concept of authority in literary studies than is found in earlier accounts.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CONDITIONS OF LITERARY VOCATION

Michael Davitt Bell, Williams College

1 Beginnings of Professionalism

2 Women's Fiction and the Literary Marketplace in the 1850s

THE LITERATURE OF EXPANSION AND RACE

EricJ. Sundquist, University of California, Los Angeles

1 Exploration and Empire

2 The Frontier and American Indians

3 The Literature of Slavery and African American Culture

THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS

Barbara L. Packer, University of California, Los Angeles

1 Unitarian Beginnings

2 The Assault on Locke

3 Carlyle and the Beginnings of American Transcendentalism

4 "Annus Mirabilis"

5 The Establishment and the Movement

6 Letters and Social Aims

7 The Hope of Reform

8 Diaspora

9 The Antislavery Years

NARRATIVE FORMS

Jonathan Arac, University of Pittsburgh

1 Establishing National Narrative

2 Local Narratives

3 Personal Narratives

4 Literary Narrative

5 Crisis of Literary Narrative and Consolidation of

 National Narrative

 Chronology

 Bibliography

 Index