The Crossroads of American History and Literature

“Crossroads is a significant book for two reasons: the essays it contains remain a rich repository of high quality scholarship on American literature and cultural history, and it models the rigors and rewards of a prolonged commitment to a set of methodologies and lines of inquiry directed not by academic fashion but by an unflagging desire to pursue the meaning of complex cultural questions.” —American Literature

“This collection offers two particularly appealing elements—Gura's coverage of two of the most important intellectual movements in America before the Civil War, Puritanism and Transcendentalism, and the theoretical position that informs the volume, a consciousness of the importance of the interdisciplinary connections between intellectual and cultural history, as it is practiced in history departments, and literary criticism, as it is practiced in English departments.” —David M. Robinson, Oregon State University