Modern American literature is too vast and varied to be studied between the covers of a single book. Although limited by space, a sincere effort has been made in this anthology to put together deeply perceptive articles on some of the most influential and representative American authors and literary works. Among the writers studied here are Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Earnest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Toni Morrison, Harold Robbins, Eugene O’Neill and Edward Albee who represent most of the important genres and trends in American literature today. Thoreau and Whitman have been included not because they are ‘modern’ but because of their immense contribution to the evolution of the American thought and literature.
The novels and plays specially focussed upon are: The Old Man and the Sea, Look Homeward, Angel, The Bluest Eye, Sula, Where Love Has Gone, Desire Under the Elms, A Streetcar Named Desire, A Delicate Balance and Tiny Alice.
It is earnestly hoped that teachers, research students and scholars interested in American literature will find this book immensely useful.
Rajeshwar Mittapalli is an Associate Professor of English at Kakatiya University, Warangal, Andhra Pradesh, India. His published works of criticism include The Novels of Wole Soyinka (1990) and Indian Women Novelists and Psychoanalysis (1998). Apart from several volumes in this series of anthologies, he has edited Post-modernism and English Literature (1999), Lifescapes (1999), Indian Fiction in English (1999), The Novels of Anita Desai (2000), Kamala Das: A Critical Spectrum (2001) and IT Revolution, Globalization and the Teaching of English (2001). Another dozen books are in various stages of preparation.
Dr. Mittapalli is currently the editor of The Atlantic Literary Review published from New Delhi. Earlier he had been the Associate Editor of the prestigious Kakatiya Journal of English Studies for several years.
So far he has published 28 articles on Indian, African and American fiction and ELT in such reputed journal as New Quest, Indian Literature, The Journal of Indian Writing in English, Commonwealth Quarterly, The Commonwealth Review, Revaluations, Triveni and College English Review.
Claudio Gorlier has been a Professor of Literatures of the English-Speaking Countries at the University of Turin, Italy. He is currently associated with the Centre for the Study of Literatures and Cultures of Emerging Areas [CSAE], University of Turin, Turin, Italy.
During his long teaching career he was a Visiting Professor at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA and Research Fellow at Vandebilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA.
He published books, in Italian and English, on the literature and culture of New England in the nineteenth century, history of the American blacks and the American Renaissance. His numerous essays on postcolonial literatures were published in such prestigious journals as World Literature Written in English (WLWE), World Literature To-day, Research in African Literature, Okike (Nigeria), Logos (Namibia), The Journal of India Writing in English and Quest.
