The American Sentence
From Pulpit to Pulp Fiction
Bloomsbury Academic · Print & ebook · December 11, 2025
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 whatisan 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.
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- Who it’s for
- Ira Nadel traces how the American sentence changes across literary history and communication.
- Genres
- American Lit Crit, Books & Reading, Writing as a Career
- Published
- Bloomsbury Academic, December 11, 2025
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Start with this bookAbout this book
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 whatisan 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.
Continue reading
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.
American Sentences
Ira Nadel traces how the American sentence changes across literary history and communication.
Come here for
- A history of American sentences from the Puritans to the present
- Readings of sentences by Franklin, James, Stein, Davis, McCarthy, and Whitehead
Expect
- Four stages: the sermon, telegraph, newspaper, and screen
- Questions about American style, good sentences, and the sentence’s future
Where it sits
| American Lit Crit | 55% |
|---|---|
| Books & Reading | 33% |
| Writing as a Career | 20% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- Creative Writing
- Authors
- Ira Nadel, Ira B. Nadel
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Academic
- Published
- December 11, 2025
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Reading lane
- Creative Writing