The Cambridge History of American Literature: Volume 8, Poetry and Criticism, 1940-1995 (Hardcover, Volume 8, Poetry and Criticism, 1940–1995)

The Cambridge History of American Literature addresses a broad spectrum of new and established directions in American writing. An interdisciplinary forum of extended narratives, it weds the voice of traditional criticism with the diversity of interests that characterize contemporary literary studies. Volume 8, concerned with works of poetry and criticism written between 1940 and the present, brings together two different sets of materials and narrative forms: the aesthetic and the institutional. Discarding the traditional synoptic overview of major figures, von Hallberg, Graff, and Carton settle in favor of a history from the inside--a history of interstices and relations, equal to the task of considering the contexts of art, power, and criticism in which it is set.