American (USA) literature and writers
Articles
- Anne Sexton, Singer: ‘Her Kind’ and the Musical Impetus in Lyric Confessional Verse
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…
1 June 2014 - Marcus Clarke, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Cyril Hopkins1 November 2014
- Representation and Particularity in Pastoral: Some Examples from Walden
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…
30 June 2015 - Wildness and Wilderness: Anti-pastoralism and the Problematic Politics of Edward Abbey
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…
30 June 2015 - Barbara Kingsolver’s Singing Shepherd: The Lacuna as Pastoral Elegy
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…
30 June 2015 - Ecopastoralism: Settler Colonial Pastoral Imaginary in the US West and Australian Outback
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…
30 June 2015 - In Custody: Thomas Keneally and American Stories
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…
30 May 2015 - Cooper, Cather, Prichard, 'Pioneer': The Chronotope of Settler Colonialism
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)…
1 June 2016
Contributors
- Xanthe Ashburner
- Tyne Daile Sumner
- Laurie Hergenhan
- Tony Hughes-d'Aeth
- Tom Lynch
- Michael Potts
- Judith Seaboyer
- John Scheckter