The American Sentence: From Pulpit to Pulp Fiction

A compelling quest to locate a history and poetics of the American sentence, this book applies four stages of communication to the story of American writing - the sermon, the telegraph, the newspaper and the screen - to ask what is an American sentence and how has it changed?

While sentences have become the subject of their own form, literary histories, cultural narratives, and personal writings have not centred on the sentence as a singular object. There is no history of the sentence. This book addresses that absence, reviewing American style through American literary history for evolutionary moments in the development of the American sentence from the Puritans to the present day.

Reading sentences from writers as diverse as Benjamin Franklin, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Lydia Davis, Cormac McCarthy and Colson Whitehead, we find ourselves asking if a poetics of the American sentence actually exists, whether good sentences are the reason we read, and what the future of the American sentence might be.

Ira Nadel is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a UBC Distinguished University Scholar and a winner of the Medal for Canadian Biography. Based at the University of British Columbia, he has lectured throughout Europe, North America and Asia. His works include Love and Russian Literature, From Benjamin to Woolf (2024), Philip Roth, A Counterlife (2021), Virginia Woolf (2016), Double Act: A Life of Tom Stoppard (2002) and Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen (1996).