Still the New World

American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction

Philip Fisher

  • Co-Winner of the 2000 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin

Introduction

American Abstraction

Democratic Social Space

Whitman and the Poetics of a Democratic Social Space

Defecting from American Abstraction

Transparency and Obscurity: Melville's Benito Cereno

Hierarchical Social Space: Twain, James, and Howells

Regionalism

Membership and Identity

Episodes of Regionalism

Realism

Realisms of Detail, State, and Voice

Inventing New Frames for Realism

Conclusion

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

  • Cover: Still the New World

Philip Fisher is the Felice Crowl Reid Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard University.