Philip Fisher

Among his books, he is the author of Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction (1999), which shared the 2000 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. In this book, he describes generational life as a series of renewed acts of immigration into a new world. He writes that technological change brings about an immigration of objects and systems, ways of life and techniques for the distribution of ideas. Ranging from roughly 1850 to 1940, when, he argues, the American cultural and economic system was set in place, the book reconsiders key works in the American canon. Shows how authors created and recreated a democratic poetics marked by a rivalry between abstraction, regionalism, and varieties of realism-and in doing so, defined American culture as an ongoing process of creative destruction. He has also written books on the emotions in literature and philosophy, The Vehement Passions (1999), and Wonder, The Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (1998), along with books and essays on modern American Arts in a culture of museums (Making and Effacing Art (1991)).