Search -
Still the New World : American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction
Still the New World American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction Author:Philip Fisher A provocative new way of accounting for the spirit of America and its literary tradition, Still the New World reconsiders a set of key works by Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Twain, James, Howells, Dos Passos, and Nathanael West. With striking clarity and provocative arguments about immigration and restless technology as the two cornerstone conditi... more »ons of American life, Fisher explores the creation and re-creation of a democratic poetics marked by a rivalry between abstraction, regionalism, and varieties of visual and aural realism within a literary culture forced to compete with newspapers, films, radio, and other media for the telling of stories and the depiction of democratic personality. "Ours is a nation that remade itself with every new generation, with every wave of immigrants, each of them followed by a wave of their exceptionally adaptable children. This unceasing process of innovation and abstraction—of continuously erasing the past and reinventing the future—is a hallmark of the uniquely American form of competitive technological capitalism that elicits Fisher's wholehearted admiration. Still the New World is fresh, cogent, provocative, patriotic, and pitiless." —Leo Marx, author of The Machine in the Garden« less