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 and too often,' she writes, 'we teachers of English approach poetry through analysis. This method…

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 simple task: Walden seems to us pre-eminently pastoral exactly in its rejection of ‘civilized life’…

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 a park ranger in the American southwest, first brought him to widespread public attention. The…

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 and generative device has become marked. Ian McEwan (Black Dogs 1992), Philip Roth (…

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 literally, became in Europe’s ‘new’ worlds of settler colonialism, such as the United States and…

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 patterns of risk-taking inform much of his work, including his engagement with American materials. Here…

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) and Katharine Susannah Prichard’s The Pioneers (1915). The three novels, although moving widely across time…