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Gesta Humanorum Studies

in Historicist Mode

Long regarded as a major voice in the study of American Literature, Roy Harvey Pearce has gathered major essays from the past twenty years into one volume and combined them with new material to present his view of literature in general and of American literature in particular.

The studies collected here are informed by a conviction that works of literature, like all human acts, however recorded, are extricably implicated in the historical situations out of which they come.

In his Foreword and in the essays in Part I, Pearce shows how his own critical stance, which he says is grounded in sociocultural responsibility, in Humanism, is both related to and distinct from the New Historicisms that are emerging in critical circles.

In Part II, in essays on such subjects as Revolutionary War poetry, Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, the 1855 Leaves of Grass, Huckleberry Finn, Wallace Stevens, and post-modern poetry, Pearce uses the theoretical framework established in Part I to interpret a broad range of American writers...

CONDITION:NEW, very light wear to DJ from shelving only, spine is tight and pages are crisp and clean!