Book Your Summer Shop Summer Reading
Children of the Raven and the Whale: Visions and Revisions in American Literature
Taking its cue from Perry Miller’s 1956 classic of American literary criticism, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville, Caroline Chamberlin Hellman’s new book examines ways in which contemporary multi-ethnic writers of the United States have responded to nineteenth- and early twentieth century texts historically central to the American literary canon.

Each chapter of Children of the Raven and the Whale looks down the roads American literature ultimately traveled, examining pairs and constellations of texts in conversation. In their rewritings and layerings of new stories over older ones, contemporary writers forge ahead in their interrogations of a spectrum of American experience, whether they or their characters are native to the United States, first- or second-generation immigrants, or transnational. Revealing the traces of texts by writers such as Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin lying beneath contemporary American literature by Chang-rae Lee, Jonathan Lethem, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Díaz, Joseph O’Neill, Colum McCann, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hellman posits the existence of a twenty-first-century American renaissance.

"1130973189"
Children of the Raven and the Whale: Visions and Revisions in American Literature
Taking its cue from Perry Miller’s 1956 classic of American literary criticism, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville, Caroline Chamberlin Hellman’s new book examines ways in which contemporary multi-ethnic writers of the United States have responded to nineteenth- and early twentieth century texts historically central to the American literary canon.

Each chapter of Children of the Raven and the Whale looks down the roads American literature ultimately traveled, examining pairs and constellations of texts in conversation. In their rewritings and layerings of new stories over older ones, contemporary writers forge ahead in their interrogations of a spectrum of American experience, whether they or their characters are native to the United States, first- or second-generation immigrants, or transnational. Revealing the traces of texts by writers such as Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin lying beneath contemporary American literature by Chang-rae Lee, Jonathan Lethem, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Díaz, Joseph O’Neill, Colum McCann, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hellman posits the existence of a twenty-first-century American renaissance.

29.5 In Stock
Children of the Raven and the Whale: Visions and Revisions in American Literature

Children of the Raven and the Whale: Visions and Revisions in American Literature

by Caroline Chamberlin Hellman
Children of the Raven and the Whale: Visions and Revisions in American Literature

Children of the Raven and the Whale: Visions and Revisions in American Literature

by Caroline Chamberlin Hellman

Overview

Taking its cue from Perry Miller’s 1956 classic of American literary criticism, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville, Caroline Chamberlin Hellman’s new book examines ways in which contemporary multi-ethnic writers of the United States have responded to nineteenth- and early twentieth century texts historically central to the American literary canon.

Each chapter of Children of the Raven and the Whale looks down the roads American literature ultimately traveled, examining pairs and constellations of texts in conversation. In their rewritings and layerings of new stories over older ones, contemporary writers forge ahead in their interrogations of a spectrum of American experience, whether they or their characters are native to the United States, first- or second-generation immigrants, or transnational. Revealing the traces of texts by writers such as Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin lying beneath contemporary American literature by Chang-rae Lee, Jonathan Lethem, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Díaz, Joseph O’Neill, Colum McCann, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hellman posits the existence of a twenty-first-century American renaissance.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780813943602
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Publication date: 11/20/2019
Pages: 194
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Caroline Chamberlin Hellman is Professor of English at New York City College of Technology and the author of Domesticity and Design in American Women’s Lives and Literature: Stowe, Alcott, Cather, and Wharton Writing Home.

Table of Contents

1. "A Walker in the City": Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, and Walt Whitman’s Cartographic Legacy
2. Literary Custom House: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth
3. Short Happy Palimpsest: Ernest Hemingway’s "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
4. New York Unearthed: Excavating the Work of Washington Irving, Walt Whitman, and F. Scott Fitzgerald in Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland
5. Black Boys and White Whales: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Conversations with Herman Melville, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin
From the B&N Reads Blog
Page 1 of

Related Subjects

Literature
Literary Criticism
American Literature
General & Miscellaneous American Literature - Literary Criticism
American Literature * Literary Criticism
Literature
Literary Criticism
American Literature
General & Miscellaneous American Literature - Literary Criticism
American Literature * Literary Criticism

Customer Reviews