The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and Empire

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Inbunden, Engelska, 2026

1 459 kr

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The story of American literature and empire goes beyond the broad historical periodization of empire to reimagine that history. The central terms American and literature have always been tied up in US empire as well as other empires in the Americas. The word 'America,' itself the product of inter-imperial intellectual rivalry, claims the name of an entire hemisphere for one country therein. To understand the full history of American literature and empire is to recognize its deep, strategically obscure, and often disavowed imperial contexts that in turn require differentially transatlantic, hemispheric, and global frameworks of analysis. This collection thus takes a sceptical stance toward its own geographical referent. Literature has a long and continuing imperial history as empire's proxy. These essays cover canonical authors such as Cooper, Melville, Whitman, and Baldwin as well as lesser-known writers, including emergent artists focused on world-making with a reparative, speculative attention to the future.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2026-05-31
Vikt500 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
SerieCambridge Companions to Literature
Antal sidor350
FörlagCambridge University Press
ISBN9781009739436

Tillhör följande kategorier

Litteraturvetenskap inom Skonlitteratur
Amerikas historia inom Historia och arkeologi

Anna Brickhouse teaches English and American Studies at the University of Virginia. Her books include Earthquake and the Invention of America (Oxford 2024), supported by a Guggenheim, The Unsettlement of America (Oxford 2014), awarded the MLA's Lowell prize, and Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (Cambridge 2004). Susan Gillman teaches in the Literature Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her books, published by the University of Chicago Press include Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain's America (1989), Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (2003), honored by the MLA, and American Mediterraneans: A Study in Geography, History, and Race (2022).

Illustrations; Contributors; Acknowledgments; Timeline of texts and events; Introduction: American literary studies as empire studies Anna Brickhouse and Susan Gillman; Part I. Reimagining 'Early American' Literature: 1. Empire and the hemisphere Ralph Bauer; 2. Against imperial nature: Hérard-Dumesle and the making of Haitian revolutionary eloquence Monique Allewaert; 3. Apocalypse and Native American literature: from Samson Occom to the contemporary moment Stephanie Fitzgerald and Hilary Wyss; Part II. Imperial Nation: 4. Conquest and compost: James Fenimore Cooper and the literature of ecological empire Gesa Mackenthun; 5. Manifestly queer domesticity: empire and nineteenth-century queer fiction Rafael Walker; 6. Herman, or the ambiguities: Melville, US imperialism, and the participant critic Emilio Irigoyen; 7. Cultures of US torture: entertainment and clandestine spectacle Rodrigo Lazo; Part III. Ongoing Empire and Speculative Worlds: 8. The Du Bois genealogy: three worlds and three writers on Black anti-imperialism Alex Lubin; 9. Harry Dean Foster and the project of black maritime empire Nadia Nurhussein; 10. Elusive 'sun-bright hardness': the Caribbean horizons of Black renaissance fiction in an age of rising US empire Jak Peake; 11. What we know that we don't know: Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, and Ocean Vuong on US empire and desire Meg Wesling; 12. Transpacific entanglements: Korean immigrant writers and militarized modernity in American literature Jeehyun Lim; 13. Undocutime: containment, coloniality, and childhood in Javier Zamora's Solito Catherine S. Ramírez; 14. Speculative fiction as anti-colonial theory: indigenous and Latinx film and literature María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo; Afterword Anna Brickhouse and Susan Gillman; Further reading; Index.