Recreates and reassesses the key events, developments, cultural and political dilemmas, and various movements and achievements of a turbulent decade

Product Description: A series of introductory essays acquaints readers with the key themes and contexts of Baldwin's work, the culture and politics of his time. Classic and contemporary pieces discuss Baldwin's essays and their cultural and political context...read more

Product Description: This title presents in-depth critical discussions of his life and works. Widely celebrated during his lifetime as the greatest living American poet, Robert Frost remains one of the few poets whose work is enjoyed by scholars and general readers alike...read more

Product Description: The Rise of Silas Lapham, by William Dean Howells, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras...read more

Reinterprets Stendhal's metaphor and tracks the different worlds of an array of twentieth-century writers ranging from realists to wildly inventive postwar writers. This book puts forward an argument that fiction yields rich insight into its subject, and that literature can also be a form of historical understanding.

Product Description: The twenty-five years after the Second World War were a lively and fertile period for the American novel and an era of momentous transformation in American society. Taking his title from the Kafka parable about the leopards who kept racing into the courtyard of the temple, disrupting the sacrifice, until they were made part of the ritual, Morris Dickstein shows how a daring band of outsiders reshaped the American novel and went on to dominate American fiction for the rest of the century...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Although long considered the most distinctive American contribution to philosophy, pragmatism—with its problem-solving emphasis and its contingent view of truth—lost popularity in mid-century after the advent of World War II, the horror of the Holocaust, and the dawning of the Cold War...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Provides a historical look at the role of the critic in American and English literature, from Matthew Arnold to more recent examples

Correlates the personality and works of Keats, analyzing the inner division between psyche and rationale that erupted into his interpretations of Romanticism