Still the new world : American literature in a culture of creative destruction / Philip Fisher.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fisher, Philip, 1941-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

American literature.

Literature and society--United States--History.

Literature and society.

Conflict of generations in literature.

Social change in literature.

Future, The, in literature.

History.

United States.

American literature--19th century--History and criticism.

American literature--20th century--History and criticism.

United States--Social life and customs--19th century.

United States--Social life and customs--20th century.

Local Subjects:

American literature--19th century--History and criticism.

American literature--20th century--History and criticism.

United States--Social life and customs--19th century.

United States--Social life and customs--20th century.

Physical Description:

290 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1999.

Summary:

In this bold reinterpretation of American culture. Philip Fisher describes generational life as a series of renewed acts of immigration into a new world. Along with the actual flood of immigrants, technological change brings about an immigration of objects and systems, ways of life and techniques for the distribution of ideas.

A provocative new way of accounting for the spirit of literary tradition, Still the New World makes a persuasive argument against the reduction of literature to identity questions of race, gender, and ethnicity. Ranging from roughly 1850 to 1940, when, Fisher argues, the American cultural and economic system was set in place, the book reconsiders key works in the American canon -- from Emerson, Whitman, and Melville, to Twain, James, Howells, Dos Passos, and Nathanael West, with insights into such artists as Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. With striking clarity, Fisher shows how these artists created and recreated a democratic poetics marked by a rivalry between abstraction, regionalism, and varieties of realism -- and in doing so, defined American culture as an ongoing process of creative destruction.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [279]-284) and index.

ISBN:

0674838599

OCLC:

39897287