RECOMMENDED REFERENCE AND SECONDARY SOURCES
Special tip: to learn more about your author see:
Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Research Company.
You can use other reference works to learn about your literary/historical
period. Here are just a few literary histories that are available at our library:
James D. Hart , The Oxford Companion To American Literature, with
revisions and additions by Phillip W. Leininger. 6th ed. New York : Oxford
University Press, 1995.
Guide To American Literature And Its Backgrounds Since 1890. Edited
by Howard Mumford Jones and Richard M. Ludwig.Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1972.
Literary History of the United States. Edited by Robert E. Spiller.
Third ed.. New York: Macmillan, 1963.
Brander Matthews. An Introduction to the Study of American Literature.
New York: American Book Company, 1896.
Vernon Louis Parrington. Main Currents in American Thought. New
York : Harcourt, Brace, 1954
The Penguin Companion To American Literature. Edited by Malcolm
Bradbury, Eric Mottram and Jean Franco. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971.
Reconstructing American Literary History. Edited by Sacvan Bercovitch.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986.
The Roots Of National Culture: American Literature To 1830. Edited
by Robert E. Spiller and Harold Blodgett. New York : Macmillan, 1949.
You can also consult texts that focus particularly on your period or topic.
For example, to investigate Puritan thought you could read:
Sacan Bercovitch. The American Puritan Imagination; Essays in Revaluation.
London: Cambridge University Press, 1974.
Sacan Bercovitch. The Puritan Origins of the American Self. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1975.
Perry Miller. Errand into the Wilderness. New York: Harper &
Row, 1964.
Marilyn Westerkamp, Women and Religion in Early America, 1600-1550:
The Puritan and Evangelical Traditions. London: Routledge, 1999.
If you are working on either the conventions of captivity narratives or
on the topic of race, you may also wish to consult the following secondary
works available at the Reserve Reading Room of the D'Alzon Library:
Richard Slotkin's So Dreadfull a Judgment : Puritan Responses to King
Philip's War, 1676-1677
Richard Slotkin's Regeneration Through Violence; The Mythology of the
American Frontier, 1600-1860.
Jill Lepore's The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of
American Identity, 1998.
John Demos' The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America.
If you are working on Franklin's commitment to getting ahead, on the other
hand, you might want to see:
Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: the Republican Vision
of the 1790s
If you are working on the Enlightenment Ideals of the Founders, see: