Literature and the American Tradition [antikvár]

Preface This book had its origin in an experiment in the writing of literary history, and it was completed under pressure. The experiment was made in response to a challenge, issued by an eastern university a good many years ago, to discover and define in a public lecture the distinctively American qualities of a seemingly incongruous group of nineteenth-century writers who were strongly affected by the European literary tradition yet maintained an independent existence within it. The pressure developed in later years when I lectured in various universities in Japan, England, France, and the Scandinavian countries and realized how eagerly many foreigners looked to imaginative literature for an imderstanding of the United States and how confused or misguided they often were by the raw facts with which the imaginative writer deals and the raw ideas he sometimes expresses. Would it be possible^ I wondered, to write a short history of American literature which would be comprehensive and at the same time analytic enough to seek out those attitudes of mind which controlled the creative imagination and helped shape the country's literature toward a recognizable national character? Imaginative literature is one of the richest and most