Recovering American Literature - Softcover

Here, as always, Peter Shaw is combative, provocative, and controversial, but above all rigorous and precise. Softheads and mealymouths, beware.--Kenneth Silverman, Pulitzer Prize winning biographer of "Cotton Mather and Edgar"

Considering the treatment meted out to the great classics of American literature by Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain, and Henry James, Shaw shows convincingly how they have been systematically raided by academic critics in the service of political correctness, and virtually robbed of their deepest meaning. This book demonstrates that it is possible to read literature and be highly conscious of the political, without descending into the merely ideological. - Dinesh DSouza.