American literature is typically seen as something that inspired its own conception and that sprang into being as a cultural offshoot of America's desire for national identity. But what of the vast precedent established by English literature, which was a major American import between 1750 and 1850? In The Importance of Feeling English, Leonard Tennenhouse revisits the landscape of early American literature and radically revises its features. Using the concept of transatlantic circulation, he shows how some of the first American authors--from poets such as Timothy Dwight and Philip Freneau to novelists like William Hill Brown and Charles Brockden Brown--applied their newfound perspective to pre-existing British literary models. These American "re-writings" would in turn inspire native British authors such as Jane Austen and Horace Walpole to reconsider their own ideas of subject, household, and nation. The enduring nature of these literary exchanges dramatically recasts early American literature as a literature of diaspora, Tennenhouse argues--and what made the settlers' writings distinctly and indelibly American was precisely their insistence on reproducing Englishness, on making English identity portable and adaptable. Written in an incisive and illuminating style, The Importance of Feeling English reveals the complex roots of American literature, and shows how its transatlantic movement aided and abetted the modernization of Anglophone culture at large.

Product Description: Mapping Region in Early American Writing is a collection of essays that study how early American writers thought about the spaces around them. The contributors reconsider the various roles regions―imagined politically, economically, racially, and figuratively―played in the formation of American communities, both real and imagined...read more

This is one of the most important studies of Eisenstein to have appeared in any language. Acclaimed as the 'greatest filmmaker of all time,' Eisenstein is a figure of mythic dimension. The recent discovery and publication (in Russian) of thousands of pages of his theoretical writings have led to the realization that he was also one of the prolific and most consistent theoreticians of cinema. Jacques Aumont, a leading French film scholar and film theoretician, presents an original and nuanced analysis of the man Eisenstein and his theoretical formulations. Aumont interrogates the writings and films for an understanding of the aesthetic, social, and psychological assumptions underlying the concept and practice of montage. Aumont's systematic reading of Eisenstein's 'oeuvre,' the detailed confrontation of his theories and films, shows that Eisenstein's theoretical system remains one of the few consistent aesthetics of film.

Product Description: In Godly Letters, Michael J. Colacurcio analyzes a treasury of works written by the first generation of seventeenth-century American Puritans. Arguing that insufficient scrutiny has been given this important oeuvre, he calls for a reevaluation of the imaginative and creative qualities of America's early literature of inspired ecclesiological experiment, one that focuses on the quality of the works as well as the demanding theology they express...read more

Each title in this series examines the history, development, and people integral to the evolution of American literature in an attempt to place popular American literature in its historical and cultural context.

'Examines the works of four writers from the early period of English colonization: John Smith's Generall Historie of Virginia, William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation, Thomas Morton's New English Canaan, and Roger Williams's A Key into the Language of America (in conjunction with The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution)'--Provided by publisher.