In an age of globalisation, it has become increasingly difficult to characterise the United States as culturally and linguistically homogenous and impermeable to influences from beyond its territorial borders.
This series seeks to provide more cosmopolitan and transnational perspectives on American literature, by offering:
in-depth analyses of American writers and writing literature by internationally based scholars
critical studies that foster awareness of the ways in which American writing engages with writers and cultures north and south of its territorial boundaries, as well as with the writers and cultures across the Atlantic and Pacific.
Edited
By MARGARET BEETHAM, Ann Heilmann
June 28, 2012
Since the 1970s, the literary and cultural politics of the turn-of-the-century New Woman have received increasing academic attention. Whether she is seen as the emblem of sexual anarchy, an agent of mediation between mass market and modernist cultures, or as a symptom of the consolidation of ...
By Stephen Knadler
May 30, 2012
Through a reading of periodicals, memoirs, speeches, and fiction from the antebellum period to the Harlem Renaissance, this study re-examines various myths about a U.S. progressive history and about an African American counter history in terms of race, democracy, and citizenship. Reframing 19th ...
By Megan Riley McGilchrist
February 24, 2012
The western American landscape has always had great significance in American thinking, requiring an unlikely union between frontier mythology and the reality of a fragile western environment. Additionally it has borne the burden of being a gendered space, seen by some as the traditional "virgin ...
By Helena Grice
August 15, 2011
The last ten years have witnessed an enormous growth in American interest in Asia and Asian/American history. In particular, a set of key Asian historical moments have recently become the subject of intense American cultural scrutiny, namely China’s Cultural Revolution and its aftermath; the Korean...
By Catherine Morley
January 06, 2011
This volume explores the confluences between two types of literature in contemporary America: the novel and the epic. It analyses the tradition of the epic as it has evolved from antiquity, through Joyce to its American manifestations and describes how this tradition has impacted upon ...
By Justine Tally
January 06, 2011
This work expands the scope of Morrison’s project to examine the ways and means of memory in the preservation of belief systems passed down from the earliest civilizations (both the Classical Greek and the Ancient Egyptian) as a challenge to the sterility of modernity. Moreover, this research ...
By Finn Pollard
June 18, 2010
"What then is the American, this new man?" This question is explored here through the lives and writings of a sequence of imaginative authors each of whom confronted a crucial moment in the evolution of the new nation (from Crevecoeur and the Revolution, through Washington Irving and ...
By Colleen G. Boggs
January 29, 2009
What is transnationalism and how does it affect American literature? This book examines nineteenth century contexts of transnationalism, translation and American literature. The discussion of transnationalism largely revolves around the question of what role nationalism plays in the ...
By Helen May Dennis
September 30, 2009
Native American Literature underwent a Renaissance around 1968, and the current canon of novels written in the late twentieth century in American English by Native American or mixed-blood authors is diverse, exciting and flourishing. Despite this, very few such novels are accepted as part of the ...
By Elizabeth Jacobs
September 17, 2009
Presenting an up-to-date critical perspective as well as a cultural, political and historical context, this book is an excellent introduction to Mexican American literature, affording readers the major novels, drama and poetry. This volume presents fresh and original readings of major works, ...