Timely and beautifully written, New England Beyond Criticism provides a passionate defense of the importance of the literature of New England to the American literary canon, and its impact on the development of spirituality, community, and culture in America.[...]

Is American vision implicitly possessive, as a generation of critics contends? By viewing the American poetic tradition throught the prism of pragmatism, this text contests this claim. American poems see more fully and less invasively than accounts of American literature as an inscription of imperia[...]