Still the new world: American literature in a culture of creative destruction

Abstract

In this reinterpretation of American culture, Philip Fisher describes generational life as a series of renewed acts of immigration into a new world. Along with the actual flood of immigrants, technological change brings about an immigration of objects an systems, ways of life and techniques for the distribution of ideas. The text argues against the reduction of literature to identity questions of race, gender, and ethnicity. Ranging from roughly 1850 to 1940, when, Fisher argues, the American cultural and economic system was set in place, the book considers key works in the American canon - from Emerson, Whitman, and Melville, to Twain, James, Howells, Dos Passos, and Nathaniel West, with insights into such artists as Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins.