READING LIST: HISTORIA LITERARIA VII* 2012-2
The Exploded Form
Charles Johnson (1948-): Middle Passage (core text)
Essays
H. James (1843-1916): ‘The Art of Fiction’
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946): ‘Composition as Explanation’
Toni Morrison (1931-): ‘Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature’
Susan Sontag (1933-2004): ‘Against Interpretation’ (1966)
Joan Didion (1934-): ‘On Self-Respect’
Alice Walker (1944-): ‘In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens’
Narrative Fiction
H. James (1943-1916): The Aspern Papers/ The Turn of the Screw
Kate Chopin (1850-1904): The Awakening
Susan Glaspell (1882-1948), ‘A Jury of Her Peers’
Edith Wharton (1862-1937): ‘The Other Two’
Willa Cather (1873-1947): ‘Neighbor Rosicky’
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946): ‘The Good Anna’
Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941): ‘Queer’
Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980): ‘Old Mortality’
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960): ‘The Gilded Six-Bits’, ‘How It Feels to Be Colored Me’
William Faulkner (1897-1962): The Sound and the Fury
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961): ‘Big Two-Hearted River’
Carson McCullers (1917-1967): The Ballad of the Sad Café
Toni Morrison (1931-): Sula
Cormac McCarthy: The Road
The Necessary Angel: Modern American Poetry (selection from the Norton Anthology)
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). 2 pre-modernist poems
Robert Frost (1874-1963): ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening/‘The Road Not Taken’.
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955): ‘The Snow Man’/ ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’/ ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’/ ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ (2 of these)
W.C. Williams (1883-1963): ‘Queen-Ann’s-Lace’/ ‘The Term’/ ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’/ ‘This Is Just to Say’/extracts from ‘Paterson’ (3 of these)
E. Pound (1885-1972): ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: Life and Contacts’/The Cantos (I)
Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) (1886-1961): ‘Oread’/ ‘The Walls Do Not Fall’
M. Moore (1887-1972): ‘The Past if the Present’/ ‘The Fish’/ ‘To a Snail’/ ‘Poetry’/ ‘The Student’/ ‘Bird-Witted (2 of these)
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950): 2 in the Anthology
e.e. cummings (1894-1962): ‘Buffalo Bill’ and another in the Anthology
Langston Hughes (1902-1967): ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’/ ‘Mother to Son’/ ‘Mulatto’/ ‘Young Gal’s Blues’ (2 of these)
Charles Olson (1910-1970): Selections from The Maximus Poems
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), Robert Lowell (1917-1977), Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), Denise Levertov (1923-1997), Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), John Ashbery (1927-), Adrienne Rich (1929-), Gary Snyder (1930-), Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), Audre Lorde (1934-1992), Rita Dove (1952-). (2 poems by each poet chosen)
Please make sure to have The Norton Anthology for this course.
* This list may be changed depending on the students’ participation and input, but these texts should be read before the semester begins.
Evaluation: Continuous assessment (class participation/field work/homework/essays/exams)

Bibliography of Useful Sources
These theoretical and critical works are among the many that may be found on the literatures of the United States of America in print and on the internet. Several may seem to be dated in approach and style, but should not be ignored, because they were fundamental in their time to the development of the study of American literatures. This bibliography does not attempt, by any means, to be exhaustive. It provides an essential background for those studying the literature of the USA. The Cambridge Companions and other series on USA literatures are not listed, as they are listed on the web.

Alter, Robert. 1975. Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
The American Transcendentalists. 1957. Ed. Percy Miller. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co. Inc.
Autores contemporáneos de Quebec. Breve antología. 1993. Ed. Louis Jolicoeur. México: Dirección de Literatura, UNAM
Bennett, Paula. 1990. My Life a Loaded Gun. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Beyond the Borders. American Literature and Post-Colonial Theory. 2003. Ed. Deborah L. Madsen. London: Pluto Press.
Bigsby, Christopher and Temperley, Howard. 2005. A New Introduction to American Studies. London: Longman
_______________. 2006. Remembering Arthur Miller. London: Methuen
Booth, Wayne. 1961. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Borges, Jorge Luis. 1971. An Introduction to American Literature. Lexington: Lexington University Press of Kentucky.
Bradbury, Malcolm. 1992. The Modern American Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brinnin, John Malcolm. 1987. The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World. Foreword John Ashbery. New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. Inc.
Brooke-Rose, Christine. 1981. A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative & Structure, Especially of the Fantastic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. 1998. Ed. Robert S. Levine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Culture. 2006. Ed. Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cawelti, John G. 1976. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press..
Cunliffe, Marcus. 1967. The Literature of the United States. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd.
Chase, Richard. 1957. The American Novel and its Tradition. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.
Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory. 1993. Ed. and Intro. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd
Culler, Jonathan. 1983. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. London: Routledge.
_____________. 1981. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
DuPlessis, Rachael Blau. 1990. The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice. New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall Inc.
Eagleton, Terry. 1983. Literary Theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publisher Ltd.
Eliot, T.S. 1960 (1932). Selected Essays of T.S. Eliot. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World Inc.
The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. 1989. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin. London/New York: Routledge
Feminism/Postmodernism. 1990. Ed. Linda J. Nicholson. London: Routledge.
Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship. 1987. Ed. Shari Benstock. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Fender, Stephen. 1983. American Literature in Context I: 1620-1830. London/New York: Methuen.
Fiedler, Leslie. 1966. Love and Death in the American Novel. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd. (Revised edition).
___________. 1967. Waiting for the End. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd.
Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminist Mystique. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Inc.
Frye, Northrop. 1967. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
____________. 1963. Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World Inc.
Geismar, Maxwell. 1971. Writers in Crisis: The American Novel 1925-1940. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc.
The Gender of Modernism. A Critical Anthology. 1990. Ed. Bonnie Kim Scott & Mary Lynn Broe. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan. 1979. The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven/London: Yale University Press.
___________________________________, No Man’s Land. The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, 3 Vols. 1987. New Haven/London: Yale University Press.
Gray, Richard. 1990. American Poetry of the Twentieth Century. London: Longman.
hooks, bell. 1985. Ain’t I a Woman. Black Women and Feminism. London: Pluto Press.
________ . 1989. Talking Back: thinking feminist, thinking black. Boston: South End Press.
Howe, Irving. 1970. Decline of the New. New York: Horizon Press.
Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York/London: Routledge.
_____________. 1989. The Politics of Postmodernism. New York/London: Routledge.
_____________. 1994. Irony’s Edge. The Theory and Politics of Irony. New York/London: Routledge.
Jablon, Madelyn. 1997. Black Metafiction. Self-Consciousness in African American Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press
Kraditor, Aileen S. 1968. Up from the Pedestal. Selected Writings in the History of American Feminism. New York: Quadrangle.
Lewis, R.W.B. 1955. The American Adam. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Major Writers of Early American Literature. 1972. Ed. Everett Emerson. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Marx, Leo. 1964. The Machine in the Garden. Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mellard, James M. 1980. The Exploded Form. The Modernist Novel in America. Urbana/Chicago/London: University of Illinois Press
Michel, Alfredo. 1993. El teatro norteamericano. Mexico: Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José María Luis Mora.
Mills, Nicolaus. 1973. American and English Fiction in the Nineteenth Century. An Antigenre Critique and Comparison. Bloomington/London: Indiana University Press.
Millett, Kate. 1977. Sexual Politics. London: Virago.
Modern Poetry. Essays in Criticism. 1968. Ed. John Hollander. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Moers, Ellen. 1976. Literary Women. The Great Writers. New York: Doubleday.
Moi, Toril. 1985. Sexual/Textual Politics. Feminist Literary Theory. London: Routledge.
Moore, Marianne. 1961. A Marianne Moore Reader. New York: The Viking Press.
The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, Vol. 9. 1983. Ed. Boris Ford. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd.
Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing. 2001. Ed. Dale M. Bauer and Philip Gould. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Olsen, Tillie. 1980. Silences. London: Virago.
Ostriker, Alice. 1987. Stealing the Language. London: The Woman’s Press.
Zamora, Lois Parkinson. 1989. Writing the Apocalypse. Historical Vision in Contemporary U.S. and Latin American Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Parkinson Zamora, Lois. 1989. Writing the Apocalypse. Historical Vision in Contemporary U.S. and Latin American Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Patán, Federico. 1994. El cine norteamericano. Mexico: Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José María Luis Mora.
The Poetics of Gender. 1986. Ed. Nancy Miller. New York: Columbia University Press.
‘Race’, Writing and Difference. 1986. Ed. Henry Louis Gates. Chicago/London: University of Chicago.
Reynolds, Guy. 1999. Twentieth-Century American Women’s Fiction. A Critical Introduction. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd.
Rich, Adrienne. 1993. What Is Found There. Notebooks on Poetry and Politics. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.
Rodríguez, Argentina. 1994. EUA: sus novelas. Mexico: Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José María Luis Mora.
Rose, Jacqueline. 1992. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. London: Virago.
Russell, Sandi. 1990. Render Me My Song: African-American Women Writers from Slavery to the Present. London: Pandora Press.
Said, Edward W. 1983. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Showalter, Elaine. 1991. Sister’s Choice. Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Spears, Monroe K. 1970. Dionysus and the City. New York: Oxford University Press.
Stevens, Wallace. 1984 (1960). The Necessary Angel. Essays on Reality and the Imagination. London: Faber and Faber Ltd.
Tanner, Tony. 1971. City of Words. American Fiction 1950-1970. New York: Harper and Row.
The Theory of the Novel. 1967. Ed. Philip Stevik. New York: The Free Press.
Toni Morrison. 1990. Ed. and Intro. Harold Bloom. New York/Philadelphia: Chelsea House.
Tytell, John. 1987. Ezra Pound. The Solitary Volcano. London: Bloomsbury.
Wilson, Edmund. The Shock of Recognition. Modern Library.
______________, 1977. Patriotic Gore. Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. New York: The Noonday Press.
Wolff, Janet. 1990. Feminine Sentences. Essays on Women and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Wolstenholme, Susan. 1993. Gothic (Re)Visions. Writing Woman as Readers. Albany: State University of New York Press.