Bøker i Wisconsin project on American writers-serien

Tracing ideas of the sublime in American literature from Puritan writings to the postmodern epoch, the author demonstrates that the North American landscape has been the ground for political as well as aesthetic transport. He adopts an historical approach to the subject.

Paul Jay focuses his analysis on two strands of American criticism. The first attempts to revive what Jay insists is an anachronistic pragmatism derived from Emerson, James and Dewey. The second tends to reduce American criticism to a metadiscourse about the contingent grounds of knowledge.

This study of ""apocalyptic writer"" Nathanael West examines his body of work, exploring his distinctive method of negation. Locating him in an American avant-garde tradition, the author considers the possibilities and limitations of dada and surrealism as modes of social criticism.

The author places Huckleberry Finn in the context of long standing American debate about race and culture. He points out that this quintessentially American novel, assigned to many schools as an important weapon against racism, yet including the word ""nigger"", arouses controversy.

An analysis of quests in contemporary American letters, fiction and non-fiction and about contemporary reality. The book explores general issues about quest, reviews work in fiction and non-fiction that define and develop the idea of quest.