Books With Flair

Widely known as the anthology that best meshes tradition with innovation, The American Tradition in Literature enters its fifth decade of leadership among textbook anthologies of American Literature. Literary merit remains the guiding principle of selection; flexibility of organization, with Walt Whitman represented in both volumes, continues to be one of the text's hallmarks.

Widely known as the anthology that best unites tradition with innovation, The American Tradition in Literature is proud to enter its fifth decade of leadership among textbook anthologies of American literature. Each volume continues to offer a flexible organization, with literary merit as the guiding principle of selection. The new photos and illustrations illuminate the texts and literary/historical timelines help students put works in context.

What really happened on the first Thanksgiving? How did a British drinking song become the US national anthem? And what makes Superman so darned American? Every tradition, even the noblest and most cherished, has a history, none more so than in the United States—a nation born with relative indifference, if not hostility, to the past. Most Americans would be surprised to learn just how recent (and controversial) the origins of their traditions are, as well as how those origins are often related to such divisive forces as the trauma of the Civil War or fears for American identity stemming from immigration and socialism. In pithy, entertaining chapters, Inventing American Tradition explores a set of beloved traditions spanning political symbols, holidays, lifestyles, and fictional characters—everything from the anthem to the American flag, blue jeans, and Mickey Mouse. Shedding light on the individuals who created these traditions and their motivations for promoting them, Jack David Eller reveals the murky, conflicted, confused, and contradictory history of emblems and institutions we very often take to be the bedrock of America. What emerges from this sideways take on our most celebrated Americanisms is the realization that all traditions are invented by particular people at particular times for particular reasons, and that the process of “traditioning” is forever ongoing—especially in the land of the free.

Publisher description

A collection of short stories and poems that traces the emergence of American literature from the early 19th to late 20th century.

For the first time, a full-scale anthology of the contemporary period in American literature is available for your classes. Chronologically organized, with authoritative introductions and bibliographies for each of the 91 writers represented, this volume affords an in-depth study of the best fiction, poetry, and drama produced since World War II.

A literary study of Native American literature analyzes its sources in oral tradition, offering a theory of "conversive" critical theory as a way of understanding Indian literature's themes and concerns.