Still The Ne World American Literature In A Culture Of Creative Destruction [Paperback]

In this bold 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 and systems, ways of life and techniques for the distribution of ideas.

A provocative new way of accounting for the spirit of literary tradition,Still the New Worldmakes a persuasive argument 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 reconsiders key works in the American canon--from Emerson, Whitman, and Melville, to Twain, James, Howells, Dos Passos, and Nathanael West, with insights into such artists as Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. With striking clarity, Fisher shows how these artists created and recreated a democratic poetics marked by a rivalry between abstraction, regionalism, and varieties of realism--and in doing so, defined American culture as an ongoing process of creative destruction.

Still the New Worlditself drifts loosely over the American landscape, illuminating major cultural currents and dipping into literary and artistic thickets that make for fascinating...exploration.[A] rich investigation into the American commitment to novelty and innovation...If 'culture,' in the anthropological sense, refers to tradition, enduring ways of life handed down from parents to children over multiple generations, Fisher argues, then 19th- and 20th-century America has had nothing of the kind. Instead of 'culture,' we have a 'culture of creative destruction,' perpetual immigration, novelty, innovation, mobility and children's wise refusal to heed the advice of parents...While much of the book, which is written in an epigrammatic style with a minimum of footnotes, is based on Fisher's close readings of Walt Whitman, Hal£$