Lauter P. (ed.) A Companion to American Literature and Culture

Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010 — 712 p. — ISBN10: 0631208925; ISBN13: 978-0631208921.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.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.