Vital Signs: Essays on American LIterature and Criticism

Tuttleton, James W.

ISBN 10: 1566631009 / ISBN 13: 9781566631006

Edité par Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, IL, 1996

A propos de cet article

First Edition, First Printing. Hard cover 8vo. Near Fine book in Fine unclipped DJ, now in clear protective cover. Approx. 6 page corners damaged/torn in production, else book Fine and unmarked. xiii, 366pp inc. Index. 383 p.

N° de réf. du vendeur 036728

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: Vital Signs: Essays on American LIterature and Criticism
• Éditeur: Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, IL
• Date de parution: 1996
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 1566631009
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9781566631006
• Reliure: Hardcover
• Édition: 1st Edition.
• Impression: 1st Printing
• État de l'article: Near Fine
• État de la jaquette: Fine
• Type de livre: Book
• Catalogues du vendeur:
  • Literature
  • Non-Fiction

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

James Tuttleton's literary writings in such magazines as the New Criterion, the American Scholar, and the Yale Review have earned him a reputation as one of our most trenchant critics. Here he collects nineteen essays derived from his long engagement with the masterworks of the American imagination. Discussions of Hawthorne and Emerson, Howells and James, Fuller and Chopin, and Fitzgerald and Anderson, among others, are counterpointed with an analysis of the effect of contemporary critical theory on the American canon.
Mr. Tuttleton scrutinizers a century and a half of great American writing from the viewpoint of literature as an art rather than as a datum of "cultural studies." He is severe with those styles of criticism that in his view drain literature of its moral and social significance, or that manipulate literature to serve an ideological agenda.
The essays in Vital Signs arise from a conviction that great literature is more than mere discourse or a semiotic freeplay of figurations. In Mr. Tuttleton's view, a great poem or novel is an ontological reality, has a living presence, and is a system of "vital signs" that, from generation to generation, illuminates the world and offers alternatives that might be our own.

À propos de l?auteur

James W. Tuttleton, who died in November 1998, also wrote The Novel of Manners in America and edited volume one of The Works of Washington Irving for the Library of America. He was professor of English at New York University.