A Companion to American Literature and Culture

by Paul Lauter (Trinity College, USA )

• ISBN13: 9781444320633
• ISBN10: 1444320637
• Format: eBook
• Copyright: 2010-02-01
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

This expansive Companion offers a set of fresh perspectives on the wealth of texts produced in and around what is now the United States.* Highlights the diverse voices that constitute American literature, embracing oral traditions, slave narratives, regional writing, literature of the environment, and more* Demonstrates that American literature was multicultural before Europeans arrived on the continent, and even more so thereafter* Offers three distinct paradigms for thinking about American literature, focusing on: genealogies of American literary study; writers and issues; and contemporary theories and practices* Enables students and researchers to generate richer, more varied and more comprehensive readings of American literature

Table of Contents

List of Contributors

Introduction

Genealogies of American Literary Study

The Emergence of the Literatures of the United States

Politics, Sentiment, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America

Making It New: Constructions of Modernism

Academicizing "American Literature"

Cold War and Culture War

Re-Historicizing Literature

Multiculturalism and Forging New Canons

Writers and Issues

Indigenous Oral Traditions of North America, Then and Now

The New Worlds and the Old: Transatlantic Politics of Conversion

Unspeakable Fears: Politics and Style in the Enlightenment

Slave Narrative and Captivity Narrative: American Genres

The Early Republic: Forms and Readers

"Indians" Constructed and Speaking

Sentiment and Style

Transcendental Politics

Melville, Whitman, and the Tribulations of Democracy

Emily Dickinson and Her Peers

Race and Literary Politics

American Regionalism

Magazines and Fictions

Realism and Victorian Protestantism in African American Literature

The Maturation of American Fictions

Making It New: Constructions of Modernisms

Wests, Westerns, Westerners

The Early Modern Writers of the US South

Writers on the Left

From Objectivism to the Haight

New Aestheticisms: the Artfulness of Art

Drama in American Culture

Contemporary Theories and Practices

Constructions of "Ethnicity" and "Diasporas"

Narrating Terror and Trauma: Racial Formations and "Homeland Security" in Ethnic American Literature

Feminisms and Literatures

Blackness/Whiteness

Borderlands: Ethnicity, Multiculturalism, and Hybridity

Literature-and-Environment Studies and the Influence of the Environmental Justice Movement

Endowed by Their Creator: Queer American Literature

Contemporary Native American Fiction as Resistance Literature

From Virgin Land to Ground Zero: Interrogating the Mythological Foundations of the Master Fiction of the Homeland Security State

Afterword

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.