The First Century Of American Literature

This volume explores the most exciting trends in 21st century US fiction's genres, themes, and concepts.

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to studying the diversity of American poetry in the twenty-first century.

What Twenty-First-Leadership Can Learn from Nineteenth-Century American Literature aims to narrow the gap between leadership theory and practice, offering an account of how leaders in organizations can improve their practice by drawing on the literary imagination. Eastman analyses how business students can use literary fiction to find solutions to workplace problems, how they can engage with fictional writers' ideas about work, morality, and the self, and how they can articulate their own ideas about fostering a deeper connection between leaders and their teams in the workplace. The book contributes to leadership studies by setting out the case for using literary fictional texts to explore leadership scenarios. It has several purposes. The first is to provide educators with ideas on how to use fiction with students following a business curriculum. The second is to encourage industry to help their employees to become better able to analyse and synthesize complex and possibly conflicting ideas as well as how to articulate these ideas with clarity. A third purpose is to demonstrate how university and industry can work together. The work presents an alternative orientation for leaders predicated on the conviction that reading fiction will support students in becoming better at thinking about working relationships and at understanding other people, and it provides the underpinnings of a unifying theoretical framework for learning through fiction in a professional context and aims to demonstrate that reading about how fictional characters respond to the challenges of life supports students to formulate their own innovative leadership thinking.

Nineteenth-century America witnesses an unprecedented rise in reading activity as a result of increasing literacy, advances in printing and book production, and improvements in transporting printed material. As the act of reading took on new cultural and intellectual significance, American writers had to adjust to changes in their relationship with a growing audience. Calling for a new emphasis on historical analysis, Readers in History reconsiders reader-response and reception approaches to the shifting contexts of reading in nineteenth-century America. James L. Machor and his contirbutors dispute the "essentializing tendency" of much reader-response criticism to date, arguing that reading and the textual construction of audience can best be understood in light of historically specific interpretive practices, ideological frames, and social conditions. Employing a variety of perspectives and methods—including feminism, deconstruction, and cultural criticsim—the essays in this volume demonstrate the importance of historical inquiry for exploring the dynamics of audience engagement.

This is the first complete narrative history of nineteenth-century American poetry. Barbara Packer explores the neoclassical and satiric forms mastered by the early Federalist poets; the creative reaches of once-celebrated, and still compelling, poets like Longfellow and Whittier; the distinctive lyric forms developed by Emerson and the Transcendentalists. Shira Wolosky provides a new perspective on the achievement of female poets of the period, as well as a close appreciation of African-American poets, including the collective folk authors of the Negro spirituals. She also illuminates the major works of the period, from Poe through Melville and Crane, to Whitman and Dickinson. The authors of this volume discuss this extraordinary literary achievement both in formal terms and in its sustained engagement with changing social and cultural conditions. In doing so they recover and elucidate American poetry of the nineteenth century for our twenty-first century pleasure, profit, and renewed study.

Reading lists, course syllabi, and prizes include the phrase '21st-century American literature,' but no critical consensus exists regarding when the period began, which works typify it, how to conceptualize its aesthetic priorities, and where its geographical boundaries lie. Considerable criticism has been published on this extraordinary era, but little programmatic analysis has assessed comprehensively the literary and critical/theoretical output to help readers navigate the labyrinth of critical pathways. In addition to ensuring broad coverage of many essential texts, The Cambridge Companion to 21st Century American Fiction offers state-of-the field analyses of contemporary narrative studies that set the terms of current and future research and teaching. Individual chapters illuminate critical engagements with emergent genres and concepts, including flash fiction, speculative fiction, digital fiction, alternative temporalities, Afro-futurism, ecocriticism, transgender/queer studies, anti-carceral fiction, precarity, and post-9/11 fiction.

This book discusses how literary writers re-envisioned species survival and racial uplift through ecological and biogeographical concepts of dispersal. It will appeal to readers interested in nineteenth-Century American literature and Literature and the Environment.