Sacvan Bercovitch

This is the most comprehensive history to date of American Literature: 8 volumes, comprising over 4000 pages, by leading scholars and critics (American and European) who in the past two or three decades have established themselves as authorities in the field. It embodies a new method of literary historiography - offering a diversity of approaches, each representing a major constituency in the current dissensus in scholarship and criticism - as well as the fullest narrative history of American writing and culture. Each volume has an Introduction by the Editor. For futher information on the History, including conferences, papers, and publications, including the Editor's "Introduction to the Chinese Translation of the Cambridge History of American Literature," 2007, go to http://www.patell.org/chal.

Vol. 1: Prose and Poetry 1590-1820 (1994), 829 pp.: Myra Jehlen, Emory Elliott, David S. Shields, Robert A. Ferguson, Michael T. Gilmore

Vol. 2: Prose Writing 1820-1865 (1995), 887 pp.: Michael Davitt Bell, Eric J. Sundquist, Barbara L. Packer, Jonathan Arac

Vol. 3: Prose Writing 1860-1920 (2005), 813 pp.: Richard H. Brodhead, Nancy Bentley, Walter Benn Michaels, Susan L. Mizruchi

Vol. 4: Nineteenth-Century Poetry 1800-1910 (2004), 562 pp.: Barbara Packer, Shira Wolosky

Vol. 5: Poetry and Criticism, 1900-1950 (2003), 624 pp.: Andrew DuBois and Frank Lentriccia, Irene Ramalho Santos, William E. Cain

Vol. 6: Prose Writing 1910-1950 (2002), 620 pp.: David Minter, Rafia Zafar, Werner Sollors

Vol. 7: Prose Writing 1940-1990 (1999), 795 pp.: Christopher Bigsby, John Burt, Wendy Steiner, Cyrus R. K. Patell

Vol. 8: Poetry and Criticism 1940-1995 (1996), 545 pp.: Robert von Hallberg, Evan Carton and Gerald Graff

The following authors have subsequently published their sections separately as books: Emory Elliott Davis S. Shields, Robert A. Ferguson, Eric J. Sundquist, Barbara L. Packer, Jonathan Arac, Nancy Bentley, Susan L. Mizruchi, Frank Lentriccia, Irene Ramalho Santos, David Minter, Cyrus R. K. Patell. Others are in the process of publication.

General Reviews

The Cambridge History of American Literature is a monumental project, eight volumes covering the four centuries since 1590....Guided by the general editor, Sacvan Bercovitch, each volume and the series as a whole negotiates its way between, on the one hand, the monolithic and, on the other, the fragmented. The notion of 'American literature' is problematized, as it should be, but it is not dismissed. The aim is not totalizing or encyclopedic, but it does not involve a surrender to incoherence either; the narrative drive of this history is simultaneously centrifugal - reminding us of the multiple, layered and even conflicted character of American social and literary activity - and centripetal - bringing us back, again and again, to the processes by which Americans have tried to make sense of their lives and changes precisely by seeing themselves as Americans....Every one of the contributors to this history adds to our sense that 'America' and 'American literature' exist and matter not least because, for centuries, writers have considered that they did and behaved as if they did; each volume in the series shows how those writers have disclosed and dramatised those continuing forms of human activity, and those persistent acts of the imagination, that constitute the making of a nation....The founding principles of the Cambridge History...were summed up neatly by Bercovitch when he spoke of making the 'problem' of critical 'dissensus' 'the cornerstone of the project.' This history is a monumental work that resists monumentality, a critical history that problematises criticism and history; it is also, as more than one contributor suggests, a work that argues and works against precisely those claims to wholeness and transcendence of conflict, the presumptions of innocence and immediacy on which the American narrative is founded....for a long while yet...this is without doubt and without any serious rival, the scholarly history for our generation.
- Richard Gray, Journal of American Studies

The last twenty years have seen significant shifts in the canon of American literature, and an equally important change in the work of American historians....There is no doubt that The Cambridge History of American Literature, with its comprehensive sweep and high ambition, is the most important publishing project currently underway in theh discipline area.
- Kate Fullbrook, Journal of American Studies

[This is] a new kind of literary history, one neither 'totalizing nor encyclopedic.' That is, whereas previous histories of American literature have consisted of either 'the magisterial sweep of a single vision or a multitude of terse accounts,' the volumes of the Cambridge History each consist of a group of lengthy essays on significant aspects of the period in question, each by a single author recognized as an expert in the field....The result is a rich tapestry in which...scholars speak to each other to provide a multi-faceted view [of the American literary tradition].
- Nancy Walker, American Studies

Individual Volume Reviews

Volume 1:

Other multi-authored literary histories exist to be consulted, but this...exists to be read with sustained interest.
- Larzer Ziff, Modern Language Quarterly

The most substantial and sophisticated set of essays to be published together as a comprehensive history of early American literature.
- Michael P. Clark, William and Mary Quarterly

Volume 2:

What material and literary conditions contributed to the unprecedented proliferation of prose in antebellum America? What characterized the dialogue between fiction and history in this period of great transformations and deep ideological strife? How do the literary works enshrined as American masterpieces relate to less canonical prose? The expansive scope of Prose Writing, 1820-1865 allows for a serious engagement with such questions, which are central to the study of American literature...[as well as for] a comprehensive catalogue of antebellum prose.
- Millete Shamir, Poetics Today

Volume 3:

[This volume] tells us where we are at this very exciting point in the study of the antebellum period.
- Philip Gura, Reviews in American History

Volume 4:

[This volume] shows how...[American] writers have disclosed and dramatized those continuing forms of human activity, and those persistent acts of the imagination, that constitute the making of a nation.
- Richard Gray, Journal of American Studies

Volume 5:

In all respects...[this volume is] representative of the critical and theoretical developments in American literary and cultural studies....[It] exemplifies the diversity and complexity of modernism as the American movement.
- Michael Boyden, American Studies International

Volume 6:

an excellent, informative, and readable account of the emergence of US modernism....
Summing up: Essential. [Recommended for] all collections.
- J. J. Beardete, Choice

Volume 7:

This history will be widely used by students of American literature all over the world. Its diversity of perspectives corresponds to the plenitude of literary and historical materials...its publication is a landmark in US literary studies, not because it pronounces the final judgment, but because it demonstrates the versatile character of both the literary achievements and the critical approaches at the end of the 20th century.
- Vladimir Prozorov, American Studies International

Volume 8:

The historical narratives which make up this latest volume...share an editorial approach which successfully avoids the traps of litany, exposition, and encyclopedic catalogue of similar overviews for the notional general (i.e. student) reader. More and other than a mere guide or chronological survey, the volume addresses writing in a variety of cultural contexts.
- Tony Barley, Borderlines