Companion to American Literature and Culture

Paul Lauter is Allan K. and Gwendolyn Miles Smith Professor of Literature Emeritus 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 seventh edition.

• List of Contributors x Introduction 1Paul LauterPart A Genealogies of American Literary Study 71 The Emergence of the Literatures of the United States 9Emory Elliott2 Politics, Sentiment, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America 26John Carlos Rowe3 Making It New: Constructions of Modernism 40Carla Kaplan4 Academicizing “American Literature” 57Elizabeth Renker5 Cold War and Culture War 72Christopher Newfield6 Re-Historicizing Literature 96T.V. Reed7 Multiculturalism and Forging New Canons 110Shelley StreebyPart B Writers and Issues 1238 Indigenous Oral Traditions of North America, Then and Now 125Lisa Brooks (Abenaki)9 The New Worlds and the Old: Transatlantic Politics of Conversion 143Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer10 Unspeakable Fears: Politics and Style in the Enlightenment 160Frank Shuffelton11 Slave Narrative and Captivity Narrative: American Genres 179Gordon M. Sayre12 The Early Republic: Forms and Readers 192Trish Loughran13 “Indians” Constructed and Speaking 206Scott Richard Lyons14 Sentiment and Style 221Tara Penry15 Transcendental Politics 237Paul Lauter16 Melville, Whitman, and the Tribulations of Democracy 250Betsy Erkkila17 Emily Dickinson and Her Peers 284Paula Bernat Bennett18 Race and Literary Politics 316Frances Smith Foster and Cassandra Jackson19 American Regionalism 328Susan K. Harris20 Magazines and Fictions 339Ellen Gruber Garvey21 Realism and Victorian Protestantism in African American Literature 354Phillip M. Richards22 The Maturation of American Fictions 364Gary Scharnhorst23 Making It New: Constructions of Modernisms 377Heinz Ickstadt24 Wests, Westerns, Westerners 394Martha Viehmann25 The Early Modern Writers of the US South 410John Lowe26 Writers on the Left 427Alan Wald27 From Objectivism to the Haight 441Charles Molesworth28 New Aestheticisms: the Artfulness of Art 458Stephen Burt29 Drama in American Culture 478Brenda MurphyPart C Contemporary Theories and Practices 49130 Constructions of “Ethnicity” and “Diasporas” 493Aviva Taubenfeld31 Narrating Terror and Trauma: Racial Formations and “Homeland Security” in Ethnic American Literature 508Shirley Geok-lin Lim32 Feminisms and Literatures 528Deborah S. Rosenfelt33 Blackness/Whiteness 563James Smethurst34 Borderlands: Ethnicity, Multiculturalism, and Hybridity 576Ana Maria Manzanas and Jesús Benito Sánchez35 Literature-and-Environment Studies and the Influence of the Environmental Justice Movement 593Joni Adamson36 Endowed by Their Creator: Queer American Literature 608David Bergman37 Contemporary Native American Fiction as Resistance Literature 622Arnold Krupat and Michael A. Elliott38 From Virgin Land to Ground Zero: Interrogating the Mythological Foundations of the Master Fiction of the Homeland Security State 637Donald PeaseAfterword 655Paul LauterIndex 657

"I believe this book is well worth dipping into. It is, I suggest, a volume of solid scholarship that should have a significant impact in what is already a quite crowded publishing area. It is highly recommended, if only for the reason that—as Lauter explains—'the literatures of this America illuminate as nothing else has done the aspirations, the contradictions, the dangers and possibilities of this society'" (M/C Reviews, November 2010)