A New Literary History of America (Harvard University Press Reference Library),   ISBN:9780674035942

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This was a gift to my son who reads every night before he goes to sleep. He really likes this one.

Customer Rating: 

This book sounded interesting, and indeed there are a half dozen essays I enjoyed. However most were quagmires of impenetrability, superficiality and hyperbole. I got a smug, self-satisfied feeling from reading this, and a claustrophobic sense as well. I regret having gotten it.

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Deep, broad, and wide.
A fascinating sampling of the intersection of America's literature and history.
It may be open to academic criticism -- what isn't? -- but for those of us pursuing livelihoods off-campus, it is an intelligent, stimulating overview of many, many aspects of our culture and our past.

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A disappointing collection--quirky, self-indulgent, uneven. It is hard to imagine what kind of reader would benefit from reading this volume. Most of the essays are little more than primers on their writers or events (Farah Griffin on Morrison, Greil Marcus on Powers). Many are written by scholars rehashing in capsule form what they or others have presented more richly elsewhere--a quickie on imperialism, anyone? Some are by writers using the author or event as a springboard for meditations ranging from the trite to the clever--Hawthorne is a flimsy pretext for Mukherjee to rehearse, for the umpteenth time, her Bengali Brahmin pedigree and her revolutionary defiance in marrying a white man. Some are from unknown and mediocre scholars writing about areas from which the major scholars have been mysteriously omitted--were the editors really so clueless about these fields, or did they just subcontract these fields to friends and former graduate students?
There are a couple of fine pieces--Walter Mosley on detective fiction , Ishmael Reed on Huck Finn, the essay on Linda Lovelace--but these are too few to make this a worthwhile purchase. If an anthology with over 200 pieces turns up only a handful of standouts, its claims as a "reference" book are overblown. For scholars looking at this volume as a reference, individual pieces would need to be evaluated carefully, since several are written by people who are not experts in the field.

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There is little match between the hype this book has generated and its contents. Let's start with the title. New? What in here is new?--not the content, insights, or approaches. What in here is literary history?--whatever is literary history is familiar, whatever is not is cultural history too scared to call itself that. So if it's not a new literary history, what is it? It's a project of epic hubris and minor accomplishment. It does, however, have the imprimatur of Harvard, multiple newspaper reviews, and a high-gloss release that will convince many readers that they have the hottest takes on Americana from the 1500s to the present. If you buy that, then $50 is quite a bang for the book!

A current of feel-good interracialism runs through this volume rising to a crescendo at the end with the election of Obama. But the volume could just as well be The Marcus-Sollors Cultural History in Black and White. The contributions on Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans are thin and noticeably weak. No major scholars in these areas are contributors--not surprising given the composition of the editorial broad and the editors of this project. The collection is heavily dominated by contributors from the Ivies with a smattering of West Coast scholars and artists. This, indeed, may be what the book really has to offer--cocktail party multiculturalism served up by the Harvard boys.