Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture
2 total works
This study, first published in 1994, looks at the cultural legacy of the sixties through ten creative figures who came of age during the Vietnam War. Wyatt argues that it is each artist's 'personal engagement' with his own era that binds together the achievements of storytellers such as filmmaker George Lucas, songwriter Bruce Springsteen, playwright Sam Shepard, journalist Michael Herr, writers Ann Beattie, Alice Walker, Ethan Mordden, Sue Miller, and poets Gregory Orr and Louise Gluck. For some their work is marked by the war and concerned directly with it; in others, Vietnam represents the prevailing counterculture sensibility often associated with the sixties. Out of the experience new voices emerge - from Michael Herr's landmark invention of a new journalistic voice in his Vietnam War reporting to Bruce Springsteen's tapping of the working class decline in postwar America.
In this book David Wyatt examines the mythology of California as it is reflected in the literature of the region. He argues that in the literature of the West, the energies, which, in other regions, had been concentrated in covenant theology or the rationalisation of Southern history, are displaced into an encounter with landscape. Tracing the early literature of California to Dana, Leonard, and Fremont, Wyatt studies their development of self-consciousness and awareness of the physical beauty in nature. He then examines in separate chapters the writings of Muir, King, and Mary Austin during a time of domestication and exploitation of the land when landscape became, of necessity, an idea or lost ideal. Of twentieth-century writers, the book focuses on Norris, Steinbeck, and Chandler, who seemed to struggle against the land, charting the advance of human hopes against the vast open spaces of the West. Professor Wyatt concludes with the writer's return to landscape as source and end in the poetry of Jeffers and Snyder.