A Companion to American Literature and Culture

by Lauter, Paul

• ISBN13: 9780631208921
• ISBN10: 0631208925
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-04-12
• 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

Author Biography

Paul Lauter is Allan K. and Gwendolyn Miles Smith Professor of Literature at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He has served as President of the American Studies Association (of the United States), and he is General Editor of the groundbreaking Heath Anthology of American Literature, now in its sixth edition.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors.

Introduction (Paul Lauter).

Part A Genealogies of American Literary Study.

1 The Emergence of the Literatures of the United States (Emory Elliott).

2 Politics, Sentiment, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America (John Carlos Rowe).

3 Making It New: Constructions of Modernism (Carla Kaplan).

4 Academicizing “American Literature” (Elizabeth Renker).

5 Cold War and Culture War (Christopher Newfield).

6 Re-Historicizing Literature (T.V. Reed).

7 Multiculturalism and Forging New Canons (Shelley Streeby).

Part B Writers and Issues.

8 Indigenous Oral Traditions of North America, Then and Now (Lisa Brooks (Abenaki)).

9 The New Worlds and the Old: Transatlantic Politics of Conversion (Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer).

10 Unspeakable Fears: Politics and Style in the Enlightenment (Frank Shuffelton).

11 Slave Narrative and Captivity Narrative: American Genres (Gordon M. Sayre).

12 The Early Republic: Forms and Readers (Trish Loughran).

13 “Indians” Constructed and Speaking (Scott Richard Lyons).

14 Sentiment and Style (Tara Penry).

15 Transcendental Politics (Paul Lauter).

16 Melville, Whitman, and the Tribulations of Democracy (Betsy Erkkila).

17 Emily Dickinson and Her Peers (Paula Bernat Bennett).

18 Race and Literary Politics (Frances Smith Foster and Cassandra Jackson).

19 American Regionalism (Susan K. Harris).

20 Magazines and Fictions (Ellen Gruber Garvey).

21 Realism and Victorian Protestantism in African American Literature (Phillip M. Richards).

22 The Maturation of American Fictions (Gary Scharnhorst).

23 Making It New: Constructions of Modernisms (Heinz Ickstadt).

24 Wests, Westerns, Westerners (Martha Viehmann).

25 The Early Modern Writers of the US South (John Lowe).

26 Writers on the Left (Alan Wald).

27 From Objectivism to the Haight (Charles Molesworth).

28 New Aestheticisms: the Artfulness of Art (Stephen Burt).

29 Drama in American Culture (Brenda Murphy).

Part C Contemporary Theories and Practices.

30 Constructions of “Ethnicity” and “Diasporas” (Aviva Taubenfeld).

31 Narrating Terror and Trauma: Racial Formations and “Homeland Security” in Ethnic American Literature (Shirley Geok-lin Lim).

32 Feminisms and Literatures (Deborah S. Rosenfelt).

33 Blackness/Whiteness (James Smethurst).

34 Borderlands: Ethnicity, Multiculturalism, and Hybridity (Ana Maria Manzanas and Jesús Benito Sánchez).

35 Literature-and-Environment Studies and the Influence of the Environmental Justice Movement (Joni Adamson).

36 Endowed by Their Creator: Queer American Literature (David Bergman).

37 Contemporary Native American Fiction as Resistance Literature (Arnold Krupat and Michael A. Elliott).

38 From Virgin Land to Ground Zero: Interrogating the Mythological Foundations of the Master Fiction of the Homeland Security State (Donald Pease).

Afterword (Paul Lauter).

Index.