San Antonio College Library

"Dealing with Thomas Paine's Common Sense (1776), John Trumbull's M'Fingal (1776-82), Philip Freneau's "The British-Prison Ship" (1781), J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782), and Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" (1819-20), Steven Blakemore breaks new ground in assessing the strategies of subversion and intertextuality used during the American Revolution. Blakemore also crystallizes the historical contexts...

"Standing outside elite or even middling circles, outsiders who were marginalized by limitations on their freedom and their need to labor for a living had a unique grasp on the profoundly social nature of print and its power to influence public opinion. In Empowering Words, Karen A. Weyler explores how outsiders used ephemeral formats such as broadsides, pamphlets, and newspapers to publish poetry, captivity narratives, formal addresses, and other...

In the period of the American Revolution the colonies as a whole awakened to literary self-consciousness for the first time. Although native drama was still in its infancy and fiction not yet born, the literature of these years, surveyed by Moses Coit Tyler in his still valuable "Literary History of the American Revolution", reveals vigor and excellence throughout a wide range of genres familiar to the eighteenth century. An essential branch of this...

"Between the newly canonized novels of the 1790s and the long-familiar novels of the 1820s, early American literary magazines figured themselves as museums, bringing together a multitude of notable content and enabling readers to choose what to consume. A transatlantic literary form that refused to break with British cultural models and genealogy, the early American magazine had at its center the anonymous authority of the editor and a porous distinction...

From America's revolutionary period to the Civil War and Reconstruction, African Americans contributed important works to the country's blossoming literary canon. Written in a variety of genres, from neoclassical poetry to sentimental fiction, their work represented a desire to bridge the racial divide and to "write themselves into acceptance." Striving for an integrated audience, they recounted experiences and voiced opinions from a unique, African...

Dickson D. Bruce argues that contrary to prevailing perceptions of African American voices as silenced and excluded from American history, those voices were loud and clear. Within the context of the wider culture, these writers offered powerful, widely read, and widely appreciated commentaries on American ideals and ambitions. The Origins of African American Literature provides strong evidence to demonstrate just how much writers engaged in a surprising...