American (USA) literature and writers

In her 1970 essay 'Rock Poetry, Relevance, and Revelation', Helen English comments on what she calls the 'painted pony' of the 'educational merry-go-round'. 'Too much…

Amongst unexpected literary connections, that between Marcus Clarke and Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the more striking ones. The main context is provided by…

In this essay, I read Thoreau’s aspirations to public attention as an instance of the literary pastoral. This may seem a back-to-front approach to a…

Edward Abbey was one of the most important and controversial figures in twentieth-century American environmental literature. Desert Solitaire (1968), his account of his time as…

Since the 1990s, the number of novelists of ideas writing in English who have chosen the humanistic literary tradition broadly termed pastoral as a generic…

As Lawrence Buell has observed, the pastoral, which in the ‘old’ worlds of Europe was a type of symbolic allegory not expected to be taken…

Keneally has frequently put himself in the way of historical crises, and has risked and most often found his individual voice within epochal stories. Such…

This essay considers three novels which each bear the word ‘pioneer’ in their titles: James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823), Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! (1913)…