American Literature Before 1880 attempts to place its subject in the broadest possible international perspective. It begins with Homer looking westward, and ends with Henry James crossing the Atlantic eastwards. In between, the book examines the projection of images of the East onto an as-yet unrecognised West; the cultural consequences of Viking, Colombian, and then English migration to America; the growth and independence of the British American colonies; the key writers of the new Republic; and the development of the culture of the United States before and after the Civil War. It is intended both as an introduction for undergraduates to the richness and variety of American Literature, and as a contribution to the debate about its distinctive nature. The book therefore begins with a lengthy survey of earlier histories of American Literature.

This book attempts an interpretation of Revolutionary American culture. It argues that the cultural identity of the United States, like its political identity, emerged from a quarrel with the Old World. Europeans believed that the Revolution had 'turned the world upside down'. American intellectuals tried to construct a republic which refuted European criticism. They failed, but in failing they created an attitude to the terrain which became a central theme in American culture. The book employs the methods of perceptual geography and close textual analysis to examine images of the terrain and to propose close links between imaginative literature and a wide range of non-literary writing.

This book is about the ways American and British writers, painters and photographers have represented the American environment. It brings together essays by American, British and European scholars which consider the one hundred and twenty years following the Revolution and examine the preconceptions, ideologies, rhetorical and aesthetic conventions that shaped attitudes to the North American continent. While ranging widely, the essayists focus on such figures as Jefferson, Crevecoeur, John Neal, James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, Thomas Cole, Samuel Morse, Fanny Kemble, Dickens, Hawthorne, Clarence King and Edward Curtis. Amongst the places featured in the discussions are the Niagara Falls, the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, Virginia's Natural Bridge, Mount Ktaadn and a Broadway omnibus. The book contains numerous illustrations, including early photographs of the western United States, and will be of interest to specialists and students of American literature, history and culture.

Most books on the American musical are little more than exercises in nostalgia. The specially commissioned essays that make up Approaches to the American Musical take a different view of the form. Going beyond the common assertion that musicals are simply escapist; these examinations of American stage and film musicals argue that Porgy and Bess, Top Hat, Kiss Me Kate and All That Jazz were popular precisely because they engaged with such important American issues as ethnicity, commerce and international relations.