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Literature Criticism
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)By 1940 Archibald MacLeish had written numerous books of poems and was a well-known writer. He was also the target of adverse criticism. His early work is too derivative. It abounds with the distracting influence of T.S....
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)It is difficult, reading Delmore Schwartz, to disentangle the poetry from the legend. The darling of the group of American intellectuals associated with the Partisan Review in the 1930s and 1940s—to which he contributed...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)Although Edgar Allan Poe wrote that for him "poetry has been not a purpose but a passion," he wrote only some fifty poems (excluding his album verses, jingles, and acrostics). Obliged to work at drudging journalism, he...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)Hamlin Garland played an important role in the development of realism in America, but the work of enduring significance that he bequeathed to the last half of the 20th century is modest. One volume of stories, one novel,...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)The son of Americans of Mexican descent, Gary Soto is not kind when describing his upbringing. In an unpublished interview (25 May 1987), he stated, "I do not come from a culturally rich family in the academic sense or...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)Gravity's Rainbow, which Time found "funny, disturbing, exhausting, mind-fogging in its range and permutations," is Thomas Pynchon's masterpiece, the absurdist and apocalyptic story of the last days of World War II with...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction is unique in two important respects. He was the first major novelist in English to combine high moral seriousness with transcendent dedication to art. He was also the first major novelist in...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)Terry McMillan accomplished a major literary feat when she dismantled a long-standing myth that black Americans do not buy or read books. When she published her third novel, Waiting to Exhale (1992), McMillan ignited the...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)William Stafford's poetry exemplifies the best of what is left of American transcendentalism. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, he regards the human imagination as "salvational," and many of his poems are...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)When Rebecca Harding Davis died in 1910, she was remembered in the New York Times obituary primarily as the mother of Richard Harding Davis, secondarily as a novelist who had, in 1861, written a story about the "grinding...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)"Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends," Philip Roth has remarked in interview; "I am also on friendly terms with Deadly Playfulness, Serious Playfulness, Serious Seriousness, and Sheer...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)Ralph Waldo Emerson was the most distinguished of the New England Transcendentalists and one of the most brilliant American poets and thinkers of the 19th century. Although Transcendentalism as a mode of Romantic thought...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)In Sister Carrie Theodore Dreiser went beyond the Hoosier romanticism of Meredith Nicholson's "Alice of Old Vincennes" (1900) and the genteel realism of Booth Tarkington's The Gentleman from Indiana (1899). Growing up...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)The opening sequence of John Greenleaf Whittier's Snow-Bound introduces one of the poem's finest features—its descriptive details. Presenting the dreariness of the weather, these details make it clear that the poem will...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)"Genius is Not Enough," the catchy title of Bernard De Voto's negative review of Thomas Wolfe's essay The Story of a Novel, was not written of Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life. Ever since the publication...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)In "The Simple Art of Murder" Raymond Chandler poured scorn on the stylized decadence of "logic-and-deduction" detective stories, all exhibiting "the same old fussing around with timetables and bits of charred paper and...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)At the burial service for John Cheever in 1982, he was eulogized as "the leading fabulist of his generation ... [who] wrote prose fiction in a manner more common with poets and their poetry." The speaker, John Updike,...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)Louise Bogan's collected poems, The Blue Estuaries, make up a slender volume that brings together work published from 1923 to 1968. She rarely wrote poems longer than a page, and all her earlier published books are brief...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)Paterson is among the half dozen or so long poems, including Ezra Pound's Cantos, T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, Hart Crane's The Bridge, Charles Olson's Maximus Poems, and Louis Zukofsky's A, that mark a resurgence of epic...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), African American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois uses the term "double consciousness" to describe the struggle of a person who is caught in "his twoness—an American, a Negro, two souls, two...