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 ...