Most books on the American musical are little more than exercises in nostalgia. The specially commissioned essays that make up Approaches to the American Musical take a different view of the form. Goi
This book attempts an interpretation of Revolutionary American culture. It argues that the cultural identity of the United States, like its political identity, emerged from a quarrel with the Old World. Europeans believed that the Revolution had 'turned the world upside down'. American intellectuals tried to construct a republic which refuted European criticism. They failed, but in failing they created an attitude to the terrain which became a central theme in American culture. The book employs the methods of perceptual geography and close textual analysis to examine images of the terrain and to propose close links between imaginative literature and a wide range of non-literary writing.
An accessible introduction to the richness and variety of American Literature up to 1880. This includes the early work of James and Twain, as well as Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Poe, Cooper, Melville an
