editorial introductions and commentary that run throughout the volume is meant to focus "strongly upon the connections between American literature and its various contexts: historical, political, economic, religious, intellectual, and international" (Elliott xxix). In other words, the social conditions under which a given work may have arisen may help foster a good understanding of its intent and content, as well as the means by which ideas emerge in that work.
The first part of American Literature is entitled "Expansion and National Redefinition: The Late 19th Century." As the designation implies, the works represented by this period reflect a context of transformation of American consciousness, including the divisions in such consciousness, brought on in the aftermath of the Civil War. The second half of the nineteenth century was marked by psychological and physical devastation of the South and an attendant bitterness by Southerners toward Northerners. Meanwhile, as there occurred the expansion to the West (accompanied by conflicts with and wars against Native Americans), the North was marked by an economic and industrial boom on one side and significant levels of immigration and working-class union activism on the other, and the South was marked by two facts, first, that it was not reconstructed along industrial but rather along agricultural lines and second, that Emancipation and sundry civil rights acts did not erase the legacy and attitudes of slavery or race hatred.
The whole effect appears to have been literature configured in an environment of diffuse energy. The poetry of Whitman and Dickinson, strongly represented in the volume, reflects something of this range of perspective as well as a concern to find a distinctively American voice. But regional and ethnic poetic voices, notably from Sidney Lanier in the South, from Emma Lazarus in the immigrant-urban environment, and from Paul Laurence Dunbar. Lanier's focus is on ...