Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now - Softcover

Delbanco, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0965833348 ISBN 13: 9780965833349

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997

Synopsis

In his deeply felt new book, the author of the highly acclaimed Death of Satan shows why classic American writers remain indispensable in our age of uncertainty over what constitutes our common heritage. In superb chapters touching on Thoreau, Melville, Wharton, Richard Wright, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, and others, Delbanco shows how each writer has enlarged the expressive range of the American language, as well as our imagined sense of American possibilities.

About this title

About the Author

Andrew Delbanco, Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, is the author of The Puritan Ordeal and The Death of Satan. He lives in New York City.

From Kirkus Reviews

Vigorous, engaging essays (many originally published in the New Republic) on the revolutionary impulses of 19th- and 20th- century writers, ``inspired practitioners of the American language,'' offering an explicit repudiation of the more arid contemporary forms of literary criticism. Delbanco (Humanities/Columbia Univ.; The Death of Satan, 1995, etc.) suggests in a brief preface that all the writers under consideration, from Herman Melville to Zora Neale Hurston, have in common the distinctly American idea that ``individual human beings can break free of the structures of thought into which they are born and that, by reimagining the world, they can change it.'' This democratic impulse to make things new seems clear with Thoreau (``to read him,'' Delbanco notes, ``is to feel wrenched away from the customary world and delivered into a place we fear as much as we need''), or Abraham Lincoln (the best example, Delbanco says, of a restorative ``universalizing impulse that cuts across the flimsy barriers by which people try to wall themselves off from those they deem unworthy of inclusion in their circle''), but less obvious in the work of Henry Adams or Stephen Crane. It is to Delbanco's credit that his highly original readings of these authors, as well as of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Theodore Dreiser, Kate Chopin, and Richard Wright, are all fresh and persuasive. Delbanco is also frankly dismayed at the kind of literary criticism that turns texts ``into excretions through which, while holding our noses, we search for traces of the maladies of our culture.'' He argues for a criticism that asserts that great prose, far from being an artifact of capitalist culture, is revolutionary, having the power both to change us and to give us pleasure. The first job of a literary critic, he asserts, is to incite readers to pick up a book. In that, Delbanco is entirely successful. A deeply felt, persuasive, and eminently useful work. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0965833348
• ISBN 13: 9780965833349
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 226