A Companion to American Literary Studies

by Levander, Caroline F.; Levine, Robert S.

• ISBN13: 9781405198813
• ISBN10: 1405198818
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-10-03
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

A Companion to American Literary Studies addresses the most provocative questions, subjects, and issues animating the disciplinary field of "American literature." It provides state-of-the-art essays on a full range of topics central to the field, examining the strengths and limitations of current scholarly and pedagogical practices and pointing to future developments and possibilities. The essays explore critical and institutional genealogies of the field, increasingly diverse conceptions of American literary study, and the unprecedented material changes to the field occasioned by emerging digital, new media, and visual technologies. Collectively, the essays provide readers with the knowledge and conceptual tools for understanding American literary studies as it is practiced today, and chart new directions for the future of the field. With its emphasis on histories, practices, and futures, the volume is an essential resource for anyone interested in American literary studies.

Author Biography

Caroline F. Levander is Carlson Professor in the Humanities, Professor of English, and Director of the Humanities Research Center at Rice University, USA. She is author of Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Culture and Literature (1998) and Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W.E.B. Du Bois (2006); she is co-editor of The American Child: A Culture Studies Reader (2003), Hemispheric American Studies (2008), and Teaching and Studying the Americas (2010).

Robert S. Levine is Professor of English and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland, USA. He is the author of Conspiracy and Romance (1989), Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (1997), and Dislocating Race and Nation (2008); he is also the editor of a number of volumes, including Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader (2003), The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1820-1865 (2007), and Hemispheric American Studies (with Caroline F. Levander, 2008).

 

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors	p. x
Introduction	p. 1
Forms	p. 13
Poetry, Prose, and the Politics of Literary Form	p. 15
The Critical Work of American Literature	p. 29
Women's Worlds in the Nineteenth-Century US Novel	p. 46
The Secularization Narrative and Nineteenth-Century American Literature	p. 61
Literatures of Technology, Technologies of Literature	p. 77
Excluded Middles: Social Inequality in American Literature	p. 93
Narrative Medicine, Biocultures, and the Visualization of Health and Disease	p. 108
Performance Anxieties: The A-Literary Companions of American Literary Studies	p. 125
Drama, Theatre, and Performance before O'Neill	p. 141
Disliking It: American Poetry and American Literary Studies	p. 158
After the New Americanists: The Progress of Romance and the Romance of Progress in American Literary Studies	p. 173
Mass Media-and Literary Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century	p. 191
Spaces	p. 209
Cabeza de Vaca, Lope de Oviedo, and Americas Exceptionalism	p. 211
Worlding America: The Hemispheric Text-Network	p. 228
Worlds of Color, Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in Early American Literary History	p. 248
Transatlantic Returns	p. 264
American Literature in Transnational Perspective: The Case of Mark Twain	p. 279
Southern Literary Studies	p. 294
New Regionalisms: US-Caribbean Literary Relations	p. 310
American Literature as Ecosystem: The Examples of Euclides da Cunha and Cormac McCarthy	p. 325
Settler States of Feeling: National Belonging and the Erasure of Native American Presence	p. 342
Tribal Nations and the Other Territories of American Indian Literary History	p. 356
Globalization	p. 373
Practices	p. 387
Democratic Cultures and the First Century of US Literature	p. 389
American Literature and Law	p. 406
Sexuality and American Literary Studies	p. 422
Exquisite Fragility: Human Being in the Aftermath of War	p. 437
The Posthuman Turn: Rewriting Species in Recent American Literature	p. 454
Narrative and Intellectual Disability	p. 469
Reading for Asian American Literature	p. 483
Untangling Genealogy's Tangled Skeins: Alexander Crummell, James McCune Smith, and Nineteenth-Century Black Literary Traditions	p. 500
Speculative Realism and the Postrace Aesthetic in Contemporary American Fiction	p. 517
The New Life of the New Forms: American Literary Studies and the Digital Humanities	p. 532
Index	p. 549
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