Books in Background to American Literature series

An engaging, full-color illustrated guide to the romantic and transcendentalist era in American literature, this updated volume provides important information on the foundations of romantic thought, romanticism and the new nation, gothic romance and sentimentalism, transcendentalism, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, and romanticism and poetic voice. New to this edition is a section discussing American idealism.

A series that is ideal for middle and high school readers examines the history, development and people integral to the evolution of American literature, placing it into historical, cultural and social context as well as exploring the political, religious, cultural, economic and social trends of each period, discussing how these trends affected the literature of the time.

Focusing on a variety of topics, from the violence of war and the struggle for civil rights to the social impact of technology and the moral significance of money, this colorfully illustrated guide to American literature from the postwar period to the present day has been expanded and fully updated. A new section titled Into the Future contains a discussion of the best young writers of recent years. A concise, engaging guide to American contemporary literature, this volume provides information on 21st-century writers; the 1950s, '60s, and beyond; contemporary American poetry; and the postmodern movement.

A series that is ideal for middle and high school readers examines the history, development and people integral to the evolution of American literature, placing it into historical, cultural and social context as well as exploring the political, religious, cultural, economic and social trends of each period, discussing how these trends affected the literature of the time.

Lines from a Canvas offers the public one of the best kept secrets in the world of poetry for years, the work of Jacob Miller. His poems uniquely traverse the cultural territory from Homer to the Grateful Dead, taking the reader from ancient Greece and Rome to the Holocaust to the Cold War to Vietnam to 9/11. In short, the expansive canvas of his content presents a compelling spectrum mixing classical and modern brush strokes, all while exploring experiences of love and loss, isolation and separation, as well as mortality. Consistent with his content, though perhaps of even greater importance, the crowning achievement shown in this collection is Jacob Miller's new poetic technique, which delivers the reader to an expertly constructed and long-needed bridge between classical traditions (such as rhyme and meter, or even hidden slant rhymes or assonance connections), and imagistic free-verse. Additionally, this collection contains the poet's free-verse libretto to the modern opera Manhattan in Charcoal,(recently released on CD). The title poem, Lines from a Canvas, offers the point of view of a canvas, not the painter, and this launches the operative conceit in this collection: each poem explores the perspective of the canvas of life and death, more than the poet himself. Each poem truly brings something new to the page.