From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature (1991)

Bradbury, Malcolm and Richard Ruland. From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature. Penguin Books, 1991.

The subject of the history of American Literature is an attractive one. Depending upon one's position it spans roughly four hundred years, making it more palatable than, say, European or Asian literary history; and it develops rather frenetically within those four centuries, thus making its study relentlessly engaging. The trouble, however, is where to start. As Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur wrote in 1782, "What is an American?" Can we rightly group John Smith (who wrote the first romance on American soil) or even Thomas Paine (whose pamphlet Common Sense was the death knell for American independence) in with the annals of American literature? Or does truly American literature start much later with the phenomenal autobiography of Boston-born polymath Benjamin Franklin? The answer probably depends on national sentiment, and this is where a history co-authored on opposing sides of the Atlantic stands out from the pile. Indeed, the preface and first section, "The Literature of British America," assure the reader that the authors are well aware of the difficulties of circumscribing the borders of such a history and proceed to pinpoint the figures and texts indispensable for America's national literature. While the prose is more shrewd than colloquial, the authors exhibit a fine command of their subject as they move from Puritanism (with its travelogues, letters, tracts, commonplace books, and sermons) to the Indian-capture narratives that dazzled so many Europeans intrigued with the mysteries of the New World's indigenous people (i.e. real Americans, whose lore will be explored later in the text) to the political writings that stirred the dust of revolution. A perusal of the index reveals all of the expected names and movements up to the 1980s (the book was published in 1991), and, coupled with the table of contents, it appears that the ratio of material from half-century to half-century is fair.