Download or read book Reading America written by Denis Donoghue and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1988-01-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is a selection by the distinguished critic of his essays and commentaries on American writing and writers, from Emerson and Whitman through Auden and Ashbery. Denis Donoghue examines the canon in the light of what he takes to be the central dynamic of the American enterprise--the imperatives of a powerful national past versus the subversions of an irrevocably anarchic spirit.