Writing of America: Literature and Cultural Identity from the Puritans to the Present

"Ward's assessments of American literary texts from the Puritans to the present are wonderfully original and provocative. Whether discussing the ‘poetry' of Harry Smith's anthology of popular music or the relations of nineteenth-century Gothic to contemporary science fiction, Ward always has something new and exciting to say. His range - from Melville to Frank O'Hara, from Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Stephen King, from Emerson to Toni Morrison - is dazzling. This is a book anyone who cares about American culture at the turn of the millennium will want to read." Marjorie Perloff, Sadie Dernham Patek Professor Emerita in the Humanities, Stanford University

"This book is vibrant with an agile scholarship and a sinuously wide range of reading across genres, texts and ideas. It is generous in all dimensions, pursuing its arguments with a polemical wit, interspersing a meditative note that is playful, punning and joking with a productive scepticism that delights in manoeuvring through a variety of directions and in an occasional placing of the exotic word that shocks us into the dictionaries. Quite simply, this is one of the most stimulating books I have read in a long time." Ian F. A. Bell, Professor of American Literature, University of Keele

"this book provides a 'dazzling' and 'ample geography' of American writing. In many passages it is, simply, breathtaking... This is a book of wonderful conflations that both mark and urge a reading of America itself as a scene of conflicting and compelling energies. I am already recommending it to all my students" History

"A single volume history of American literature "from the beginnings up to now" has become a rarity. This makes The Writing of America a remarkably refreshing work." American Studies International