The American Mystery: American Literature from Emerson to DeLillo

The late Tony Tanner was one of the most distinctive and distinguished critical voices on American literature. His work is familiar to generations of students and scholars, and has helped shape our understanding of the major nineteenth and twentieth century American writers. With a foreword by Edward Said and an introduction by Ian Bell which places Tanner’s work in the larger context of critical approaches to American literature and culture in recent years, the book brings together Tanner’s essays on a wide range of key American authors. Exploring writers as diverse as Melville, Emerson, Henry James, DeLillo and Pynchon, it offers an introduction to the major figures and themes in nineteenth and twentieth century American literature.

• The late Tanner was and is a household name; known to all students of American literature, plus booktrade • Collected essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, with foreword from Edward Said and introduction by Ian Bell • Stylish cover, this book acts as an introduction to the subject, as well as the last book by an eminent critic

Foreword Edward Said; I. Introduction A. F. Bell; 1. ‘Lustres and condiments’: Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Essays; 2. ‘A summer in the country’: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance; 3. ‘Nothing but cakes and ale’: Herman Melville’s White-Jacket; 4. ‘All interweavingly working together’: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; 5. Melville’s counterfeit detector: The Confidence Man; 6. Henry James: the story in it - and the story without it; 7. Henry James’s ‘saddest story’: The Other House; 8. Henry James and Shakespeare; 9. ‘Feelings of middle life’: William Dean Howells’s Indian Summer; 10. ‘The story of the moon that never rose’: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; 11. Don DeLillo and ‘the American mystery’: Underworld; 12. ‘The rubbish-tip for subjunctive hopes’: Thomas Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon.