A scholarly review of American world literature from early times to the postmodernist eraAmerican World Literature: An Introduction explores how the subject of American Literature has evolved from a national into a global phenomenon. As the author, Paul Giles – a noted expert on the topic – explains, today American Literature is understood as engaging with the wider world rather than merely with local or national circumstances. The book offers an examination of these changing conceptions of representation in both a critical and an historical context.The author examines how the perception of American culture has changed significantly over time and how this has been an object of widespread social and political debate. From examples of early American literature to postmodernism, the book charts ways in which the academic subject areas of American Literature and World Literature have converged – and diverged – over the past generations.Written for students of American literature at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels and in all areas of historical specialization, American World Literature offers an authoritative guide to global phenomena of American World literature and how this subject has undergone crucial changes in perception over the past thirty years.
Paul Giles is Challis Professor of English at the University of Sydney, Australia. He was previously Professor of American Literature at the University of Oxford, University Lecturer in American Literature at Cambridge, and President of the International American Studies Association.
Acknowledgments vi1 The Theory of American World Literature 1References 252 Early American Literature in the World 302.1 Contact Zones and Extended Scales 302.2 The Classical Counternarrative 412.3 The Early American Novel’s Transatlantic Axis 512.4 Thomas Paine and Universal Order 63References 693 National/Global: The Framing of Nineteenth‐Century American Literature 753.1 National Agendas and Transnational Dialogues 753.2 Slavery’s Global Compass 923.3 Planetary Space and Intellectual Distance 113References 1194 The Worlds of American Modernism 1264.1 The American Novel and the Great War 1264.2 The Esthetics of Contradiction 1464.3 American Studies and World Literature: The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath 156References 1655 Postmodernism, Globalization, and US Literary Culture 1715.1 The Politics of Postmodernism 1715.2 Styles of Globalization 1765.3 Disorientation and Reorientation: Kincaid, Morrison,Kingston 193References 202Index 208