A history of American literature

Abstract

In this history of American literature, I have tried to be responsive to the immense changes that have taken place over the past thirty to forty years in the study of literature in general and American literature in particular: changes that, among other things, have put the whole issue of just what is American and exactly what constitutes literature into contention. Interdisciplinary studies, gender, ethnic and popular culture studies, critical and cultural theory have all complicated and problematized our notion of what literature is. And the debates initiated by these newly developed fields of study have, very often, gathered around and found their focus in American books. I have also tried to tell a story: about the continued inventing of communities, and the sustained imagining of nations, that constitute the literary history of the part of the American continent which came to be known as the United States