By Fred Hobson (NHC Fellow, 1991–92) Ever in control, H. L. Mencken contrived that future generations would see his life as he desired them to. He even wrote Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and other books to fit the pictures he wanted: first, the carefree Baltimore boy; then, the delighted, exuberant critic of American life. But he … Continued
By Ezra Greenspan (NHC Fellow, 2011–12) Born into slavery in Kentucky, raised on the Western frontier on the farm adjacent to Daniel Boone’s, “rented” out in adolescence to a succession of steamboat captains on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the young man known as “Sandy” reinvented himself as “William Wells” Brown after escaping to freedom. … Continued
Edited by Emory Elliott (NHC Fellow, 1979–80) The two decades after the American Revolution contributed a rich and complex literary culture as crucial to the development of a distinctive American literature as the Bill of Rights and the Constitution were to the creation of the Nation's political system. The writings of the Republic's first men … Continued
By Heather Hyde Minor (NHC Fellow, 2013–14) Giovanni Battista Piranesi was one of the most important artists eighteenth-century Europe produced. But Piranesi was more than an artist; he was an engraver and printmaker, architect, antiquities dealer, archaeologist, draftsman, publisher, bookseller, and author. In Piranesi’s Lost Words, Heather Hyde Minor considers Piranesi the author and publisher, focusing … Continued
By Nigel Smith (NHC Fellow, 2007–08) The seventeenth-century poet Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) is one of the most intriguing figures in English literature. A noted civil servant under Cromwell’s Protectorate, he has been variously identified as a patriot, spy, conspirator, concealed homosexual, father to the liberal tradition, and incendiary satirical pamphleteer and freethinker. But while Marvell’s … Continued
By Alexandra K. Wettlaufer (NHC Fellow, 2007–08) Women in the studio: representing professional identity — "Why are you no longer my brothers?" The Fraternité des arts and the female artist in Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's L'atelier d'un peintre — Sisterhood in/as the studio: Anna Mary Howitt's sisters in art — Visualizing imagined communities: lessons of the female … Continued
Edited by Emory Elliott (NHC Fellow, 1979–80) For the first time in four decades, there exists an authoritative and up-to-date survey of the literature of the United States, from prehistoric cave narratives to the radical movements of the sixties and the experimentation of the eighties. This comprehensive volume—one of the century's most important books in … Continued
By Annabel Patterson (NHC Fellow, 1991–92) For those exhausted by the highly charged debates and polarized climate of literary studies today, Annabel Patterson’s Reading Between the Lines offers a strategic compromise: a moderate stance between the radical opponents and the zealous protectors of the traditional Western canon. She reconsiders the value of reading the white, male, canonical … Continued
Edited by David Ellis (NHC Fellow, 1991–92) and Ornella De Zordo This set of volumes on D.H. Lawrence is part of the "Critical Assessments of Writers in English" series, the aim of which is to provide complete collections of previously published, formative critical assessments covering the whole work of individual writers. They should be useful … Continued
By Emory Elliott (NHC Fellow, 1979–80) Elliott demonstrates how America's first men of letters–Timothy Dwight, Joel Barlow, Philip Freneau, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and Charles Brockden Brown–sought to make individual genius in literature express the collective genius of the American people. Without literary precedent to aid them, Elliott argues, these writers attempted to convey a vision … Continued