Bercovitch Sacvan, Carswell Charles. The Cambridge History of American Literature, Volume 1

Cambridge University Press. — 797 p.This volume, covering the colonial and early national periods, spans three centuries and an extraordinary variety of authors: Renaissance explorers, Puritan theocrats,
Enlightenment naturalists, southern women of letters, revolutionary pamphleteers, and poets and novelists of the young Republic. Myra Jehlen draws upon the multilingual literature of exploration and colonization to tell the story of how America was made up — a story of imperial expansion and imaginative appropriation. Emory
Elliott traces the explosive, conflict-ridden development of the New England Way from its fractious beginnings through the tumultuous mid-eighteenth-century revivals.
David S. Shields's focus is relatively narrow in time but rich in the materials it brings to light: newly uncovered collections of poems, essays, and letters that reveal a cosmopolitan network of neoclassical belles lettres extending from Philadelphia and New York to the salons of the Old South. Robert A. Ferguson examines the interconnections between the many forms of discourse that constituted the American Enlightenment and eventuated as the rhetoric of nationhood. Michael T. Gilmore describes a series of broad social and economic transformations — from republican to free-market ideology, oral to print culture, communal to individualist values — in the course of detailing the emergence of a national literary tradition.Volume 2
Volume 3
Volume 4
Volume 5
Volume 6
Volume 7
Volume 8