This volume, concerned with works written between 1940 and the present, brings together two altogether different sets of materials and narrative forms: the aesthetic and the institutional. Robert von Hallberg traces the course of American poetry since World War II through close readings and aesthetic evaluations, portraying American poetic production as a cultural achievement - a process of aesthetic development connecting directly to developments in the society at large. Beginning with the legacy of the great modernist poets, von Hallberg progresses through the changing avantgarde of the Beats and the Black Mountain poets to the poststructuralist Language Poets of New York and San Francisco...

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

POETRY, POLITICS, AND INTELLECTUALS

Robert von Hallberg

 Introduction

1 The Place of Poetry in the Culture, 1945-195o

2 Politics

3 Rear Guards

4 Avant-Gardes

5 Authenticity

6 Translation

 Conclusion: The Place of Poets, 1995

 Appendix I: Biographies of Poets

CRITICISM  SINCE  1940

Evan Carton and,Gerald Graft

 Introduction

1 Politics and American Criticism

2 The Emergence of Academic Criticism

3 The Nationalizing of the New Criticism

4 The Canon, the Academy, and Gender

5 Deconstruction and Poststructuralism

6 From Textuality to Materiality

7 Cultural and Historical Studies

  Conclusion: Academic Criticism and its Discontents

  Appendix II: Biographies of Critics

  Chronology, 1940-1995

  Bibliography

  Index