I. FORMATIONS 1: St. Jean de Crevecoeur, What Is an American? 2: Toward a Definition of American Literature (selections): Charles Brockden Brown, To the Public William Tudor, Excerpt from North American Review James Kirk Paulding, National Literature Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia William Gilmore Simms, Americanism in Literature 3: Margaret Fuller, American Literature 4: Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar 5: Cornelius Mathews, Nationality in Literature 6: Theodore Parker, The American Scholar 7: Nathaniel Hawthorne, prefaces to The House of the Seven Gables, Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun 8: Herman Melville, Hawthorne and His Mosses 9: Frederick Douglass, The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro 10: Mary E. Bryan, How Should Women Write? 11: Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas 12: Henry James, From Hawthorne 13: William Dean Howells, From Criticism and Fiction 14: Mark Twain, Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences 15: The Great American Novel (selections): William De Forest, The Great American Novel Thomas S. Perry, American Novels Robert Herrick, The American Novel Edith Wharton, The Great American Novel II. MODERN AMERICAN CRITICISM, 1900-45 1: W.E.B. Du Bois, The Sorrow Songs 2: Gertrude Atherton, Why Is American Literature Bourgeois? 3: George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy 4: Van Wyck Brooks, On Creating a Usable Past 5: Irving Babbitt, The Critic and American Life 6: H.L. Mencken, The American Novel 7: Alain Locke, The New Negro 8: Mike Gold, Proletarian Realism 9: John Crowe Ransom, Reconstructed but Unregenerate 10: Constance Rourke, from American Humor 11: Zora Neale Hurston, Charactersitics of Negro Expression 12: Kenneth Burke, Literature as Equipment for Living 13: J. Saunders Redding, The Forerunners 14: Philip Rahv, The Cult of Experience in American Writing 15: R.P. Blackmur, The Economy of the American Writer III. POSTWAR ERA, 1945-1970 1: F.O. Matthiessen, The Responsibilities of the Critic 2: Leslie Fiedler, Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey! 3: Lionel Trilling, Reality in America 4: Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright's Blues 5: James Baldwin, Everybody's Protest Novel 6: T.S. Eliot, American Liteature and the American Language 7: Henry Nash Smith, The Myth of the Garden and Turner's Frontier Hypothesis 8: Perry Miller, Errance into the Wilderness 9: Americo Paredes, The Hero's Progress 10: Edmund Wilson, Harriet Beecher Stowe 11: Dwight MacDonald, Masscult and Midcult 12: Alfred Kazin, The Jew as Modern American Writer 13: Adrienne Rich, Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson IV. CONTEMPORARIES, 1970-1998 1: Nina Baym, Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors 2: William Boelhower, A Modest Ethnic Proposal 3: Jane Tompkins, 'But Is It Any Good?': The Institutionalization of Literary Value 4: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Writing, 'Race,' and the Difference It Makes 5: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic 6: Hortense J. Spillers, Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book 7: Sacvan Bercovitch, Hawthorne's A-Morality of Compromise 8: Toni Morrison, Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature 9: Walter Benn Michaels, The Vanishing American 10: Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 11: Gloria Anzaldua, How to Tame a Wild Tongue 12: Lawrence Buell, American Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenomenon