Selected Secondary Texts

[Asterisks indicate books selected by at least five Americanists.]

*Sacvan Bercovitch, Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America

James Breslin, From Modern to Contemporary American Poetry, 1945-1965
            Reviewed by Anne-Kathrin Rochwalsky

Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imaging Self in Nineteenth-Century America
            Reviewed by Robin Field

*Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist
            Reviewed by Sarah Whitney

Barry Chabot, Writers for the Nation: American Literary Modernism
            Reviewed by Mike LeMaster

Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s
            Reviewed by Janice Obuchowski

Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America
            Reviewed by Mark McClure

Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s

Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction
            Reviewed by Alice Rutkowski

Stephen Fjellman, Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney World and America
            Reviewed by Jad Donohoe

Henry Louis Gates, Jr, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism
            Reviewed by Todd Cabell

Alfred Habegger, Gender, Fantasy and Realism in American Literature

Susan Howe, The Birth Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History

George Hutchinson, Harlem Renaissance in Black and White

Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture

*Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism
            Reviewed by Mary Conner Wyatt

*Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, Cultures of U.S. Imperialism

Alfred Kazin, An American Procession
            Reviewed by Elisabeth Overman

Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era

Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism
            Reviewed by Bill Albertini

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940
            Reviewed by Shoshanna Kook

Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry

Margerie Perloff, Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition

Donald Pizer, Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
            Reviewed by Stephen Repsher

David E. Shi, Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture

Robert Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative

*Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature

Tony Tanner, The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature
            Reviewed by Michael Engle

*Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture & Society in the Gilded Age

Hyatt H. Waggoner, American Poets: From the Puritans to the Present Day

Additions, Spring 1999

The above list was put together in consultation with just about everyone who teaches American literature at U.Va. in the Spring, 1998. A month ago I asked the same colleagues to come up with a couple more titles "of critical books they'd recommend to students studying for orals in the period 'Am lit since 1865.'" I only heard back from about half the Americanists. No two proposed the same title. But here, arranged alphabetically, is the list of books that request generated. (If you'd rather review one of these, let me know...)
Jane S. Becker, Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930-1940

Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity

Bercovitch & Jehlen (eds.), Ideology and Classic American Literature

Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination

Peter Carafiol, The American Ideal: Literary History as a Worldly Activity

Peter Conn, The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America, 1898-1917

Harold Cruse, Crisis of the Negro Intellectual

Giles Gunn, The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and heritage

Marcus Klein, Foreigners: The Making of American Literature 1900-1940

James Longenbach, Modern Poetry After Modernism

Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945

Louise Newman, White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of American Feminism

Jose David Saldivar, The Dialectics of Our America

Susan Scheckel, The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth Century American Culture

Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet

Elaine Showalter, Sister's Choice

Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Frontier in American Culture 1800-1890

Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity

William C. Spengemann, A Mirror for Americanists: Reflections on the Idea of American Literature

Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs

Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies
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