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Literature

A collection of textual or spoken works that share a common subject matter. Though the term traditionally refers to a humanities context and includes belles-lettres, prose, verse, fiction, or nonfiction with a recognized artistic value, the concept is appropriately applied to the social sciences realm as well. In the broadest sense, literature is a means of communication. An author or editor intends to communicate a message to be broadcast to a community of readers. The medium—be it a book, a magazine article, or a speech— is a vehicle of mass communication.

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The Deerslayer. James Fenimore Cooper wrote The...Washington Irving (1783-1859). Irving, a...
Samuel Clemens (1835-1910). Clemens's novels,...James Russell Lowell (1819-1891). In addition to...

REFERENCES

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  • Cassirer, Ernst.The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Translated by Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.
  • Gay, Peter.The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. The Rise of Modern Paganism.New York: Random House, 1968.
  • Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe; Jean-Luc Nancy. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism. Translated by Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988.

From Credo

  • Seyhan, Azade.Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism.Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992.
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  • Wellek, RenéA History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950. The Romantic Age.New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1955.
  • White, Hayden.Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe.Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.
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  • Bercovitch, Sacvan, gen. ed., and Cyrus R. K. Patell, assoc. ed.The Cambridge History of American Literature. Vol. 2. 1820-1865. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994-.
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  • Elliott, Emory, gen. ed., and Cathy N. Davidson, et al., assoc. eds.The Columbia History of the American Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
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  • Eliot, T. S., “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Edited by Kermode, FrankLondon: Faber, 1975.
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  • Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961.
  • Sherman, Joan R., ed. African American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.
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  • Avery, Gillian. Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621-1922. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
  • Estes, Glenn E., ed. American Writers for Children before 1900. Volume 42 of Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale, 1985.
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  • Ammons, Elizabeth. Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
  • Baym, Nina. American Women Writers and the Work of History. 1790-1860. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995.
  • Baym, Nina. Women's Fiction. 2d ed.New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993.
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  • Coultrap-McQuin, Susan. Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.
  • DuCille, Ann. The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text and Tradition in Black Women's Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
  • Foster, Frances Smith. Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1993.
  • Pryse, Marjorie; Hortense, J. Spillers eds. Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Tradition. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1985.
  • Stern, Madeline. Louisa May Alcott: A Biography. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996.
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  • Foster, Frances Smith. Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
  • Gates, Henry Louis Jr.; Nellie Y. McKay eds. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: Norton, 1997.
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  • Sherman, Joan R.Invisible Poets: Afro-Americans of the Nineteenth Century. 2d ed.Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.
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  • Lease, Benjamin. Anglo-American Encounters: England and the Rise of American Literature. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
  • Matthiessen, Francis O.American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1968.
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  • Ringe, Donald A.American Gothic: Imagination and Reason in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982.
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  • Weisbuch, Robert. Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
  • Wilson, Garff B.Three Hundred Years of American Drama and Theatre: From Ye Bare and Ye Cubb to Chorus Line. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1982.
  • Franco, J. (1969) An Introduction to Spanish American Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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