Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920

About the book

Parrington reads literature alongside political and economic thought, moving from colonial disputes through the nineteenth century towards the beginnings of critical realism. Sermons, public argument, and imaginative writing belong to the same broad field because they express competing accounts of how society should be organized. The three volumes are explicitly interpretive, not a neutral catalogue of authors, and their categories reflect the historian's own commitments. That makes the work useful both as literary history and as an example of a powerful critical method. Readers can follow individual portraits while testing the larger connections drawn between ideas and material interests. The final volume's different state of completion should be kept in view; the work's ambitions do not erase the unevenness of what survives.

• Literature and politics
• Democracy
• Intellectual history

Why read it

For an expansive argument about how American literary culture participates in struggles over social authority.

English literary history · three-volume text, including the final unfinished volume