The American Mystery
American Literature from Emerson to DeLillo

A collection of essays by the late Tony Tanner on a wide range of key American authors.

Tony Tanner (Author), Edward Said (Foreword by), Ian F. A. Bell (Introduction by)

9780521783743, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 16 March 2000

268 pages
22.8 x 15.3 x 1.6 cm, 0.378 kg

"The range of essays in The American Mystery is impressive and speaks to the scope and versatility of Tanner's interest in American Literature...a valuable contribution to the study of U.S. literary history and a well-deserved tribute to one of its most devoted and talented researchers." American Studies

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]