American Literature: Essays and Opinions

Description

Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) was the leading Italian scholar of American literature of the generation that came to maturity under Mussolini. He was not only an acute and wide-ranging literary critic, but also a sensitive poet and novelist. In addition, he was a prodigious translator. In collaboration with Elio Vittorini, he translated and brought to the attention of the Italian public the works of many important American writers. American literature helped to give direction to Pavese's creative work and was a resource for his personal literary campaign against Fascism. Pavese was a non-academic critic, though far less anti - academic than D. H. Lawrence. His first purpose was to use American literature to subvert Italian literature, but beyond that there were a number of issues on which he disagreed with standard American criticism. When he does, his wild, original energy of discovery can trigger a welcome change of focus for our views of American writing. Pavese never visited or lived in America; it was for him a foreign country, although a shifting and sliding special case. He had no stake in its sectional chauvinisms. He had a vital stake in its whole literature because, as his communications to Vittorini make clear, he had a stake in the literature of the whole world. For a while, America seemed to him the probable center of that whole. This was the center where things were happening in the world of the mind, and where the future was being born and licked into shape. Paveses's writings about American literature still offer original and unsparing insights. Cover Half Title Title Copyright Foreword Contents PART ONE: 1930-1934 An American Novelist, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, The Spoon River Anthology, Herman Melville, Preface to Moby-Dick, Preface to Dark Laughter, 0. Henry; or, The Literary Trick, The Writing on the Sands John Dos Passos and the American Novel, Dreiser and His Social Battle, Interpretation of Wait Whitman, Poet, Faulkner, a Bad Pupil of Anderson, The Fictionalized Biographies of Sinclair Lewis, PART TWO: 1938-1950 Preface to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Preface to "Benito Cereno," Preface to Three Lives, Additions to the Second Preface to Moby-Dick, The Dead at Spoon River, American Ripeness, A Useful Book, A Negro Speaks to Us, Yesterday and Today, The Great American Anguish, APPENDIX: ENGLISH WRITERS Preface to Defoe, Moll Flanders, Preface to Dickens, David Copperfield, Preface to Conrad, 'Twixt Land and Sea, Robert Louis Stevenson, INDEX OF NAMES,