Remapping Southern Literature

Download Remapping Southern Literature PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 9780820337012
Total Pages : 164 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (37 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Remapping Southern Literature by : Robert H. Brinkmeyer

Download or read book Remapping Southern Literature written by Robert H. Brinkmeyer and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-07 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fiction of Doris Betts, Barry Hannah, Cormac McCarthy, Madison Smartt Bell, Richard Ford, Rick Bass, Barbara Kingsolver, Chris Offutt, Frederick Barthelme, Dorothy Allison, and Clyde Edgerton, among others, challenges long-standing definitions of Southern fiction and regional identity and reconfigures the myths of the West that have shaped American life." "In Remapping Southern Literature, Brinkmeyer proposes that today's Southern writers are not by this shift abandoning Southern culture but are instead expanding its reach by seeking to balance the ideals of the South and West."--BOOK JACKET.

South to A New Place

Download South to A New Place PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780807128404
Total Pages : 428 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (284 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis South to A New Place by : Suzanne W. Jones

Download or read book South to A New Place written by Suzanne W. Jones and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2002-11-01 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place as a starting point, contributors to this exciting collection continue the work of critically and creatively remapping the South through their freewheeling studies of southern literature and culture. Appraising representations of the South within a context that is postmodern, diverse, widely inclusive, and international, the essays present multiple ways of imagining the South and examine both new places and old landscapes in an attempt to tie the mythic southern balloon down to earth. In his foreword, an insightful discussion of numerous Souths and the ways they are perceived, Richard Gray explains one of the key goals of the book: to open up to scrutiny the literary and cultural practice that has come to be known as “regionalism.” Part I, “Surveying the Territory,” theorizes definitions of place and region, and includes an analysis of southern literary regionalism from the 1930s to the present and an exploration of southern popular culture. In “Mapping the Region,” essayists examine different representations of rural landscapes and small towns, cities and suburbs, as well as liminal zones in which new immigrants make their homes. Reflecting the contributors’ transatlantic perspective, “Making Global Connections” challenges notions of southern distinctiveness by reading the region through the comparative frameworks of Southern Italy, East Germany, Latin America, and the United Kingdom and via a range of texts and contexts—from early reconciliation romances to Faulkner’s fictions about race to the more recent parody of southern mythmaking, Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone. Together, these essays explore the roles that economic, racial, and ideological tensions have played in the formation of southern identity through varying representations of locality, moving regionalism toward a “new place” in southern studies.

Rough South, Rural South

Download Rough South, Rural South PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 1496804961
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (968 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Rough South, Rural South by : Jean W. Cash

Download or read book Rough South, Rural South written by Jean W. Cash and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2016-02-12 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays in Rough South, Rural South describe and discuss the work of southern writers who began their careers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They fall into two categories. Some, born into the working class, strove to become writers and learned without benefit of higher education, such writers as Larry Brown and William Gay. Others came from lower- or middle-class backgrounds and became writers through practice and education: Dorothy Allison, Tom Franklin, Tim Gautreaux, Clyde Edgerton, Kaye Gibbons, Silas House, Jill McCorkle, Chris Offutt, Ron Rash, Lee Smith, Brad Watson, Daniel Woodrell, and Steve Yarbrough. Their twenty-first-century colleagues are Wiley Cash, Peter Farris, Skip Horack, Michael Farris Smith, Barb Johnson, and Jesmyn Ward. In his seminal article, Erik Bledsoe distinguishes Rough South writers from such writers as William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell. Younger writers who followed Harry Crews were born into and write about the Rough South. These writers undercut stereotypes, forcing readers to see the working poor differently. The next pieces begin with those on Crews and Cormac McCarthy, major influences on an entire generation. Later essays address members of both groups—the self-educated and the college-educated. Both groups share a clear understanding of the value of working-class southerners. Nearly all of the writers hold a reverence for the South’s landscape and its inhabitants as well as an affinity for realistic depictions of setting and characters.

Defining Southern Literature

Download Defining Southern Literature PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN 13 : 9780838636428
Total Pages : 472 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (364 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Defining Southern Literature by : John Earl Bassett

Download or read book Defining Southern Literature written by John Earl Bassett and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defining Southern Literature delineates several phases in the story of Southern literature. Debate over what makes Southern literature different - or even Southern - goes back many decades, and among the answers has been the debate itself, a uniquely pervasive regional self-consciousness over what makes Southern culture different. Certainly no other American region has been so distinctly "marked" as the South has. Attempts to delineate the special mission, nature, problems, and virtues of Southern writers can be traced back at least to the 1830s, when editors called - with only slight success - for a sectional literature and more supportive Southern readers.

After Southern Modernism

Download After Southern Modernism PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 1604738898
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (47 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis After Southern Modernism by : Matthew Guinn

Download or read book After Southern Modernism written by Matthew Guinn and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2011-06-14 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The literature of the contemporary South might best be understood for its discontinuity with the literary past. At odds with traditions of the Southern Renascence, southern literature of today sharply refutes the Nashville Agrarians and shares few of Faulkner's and Welty's concerns about place, community, and history. This sweeping study of the literary South's new direction focuses on nine well established writers who, by breaking away from the firmly ensconced myths, have emerged as an iconoclastic generation- -- Harry Crews, Dorothy Allison, Bobbie Ann Mason, Larry Brown, Kaye Gibbons, Randall Kenan, Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy, and Barry Hannah. Resisting the modernist methods of the past, they have established their own postmodern ground beyond the shadow of their predecessors. This shift in authorial perspective is a significant indicator of the future of southern writing. Crews's seminal role as a ground-breaking "poor white" author, Mason's and Crews's portrayals of rural life, and Allison's and Brown's frank portrayals of the lower class pose a challenge to traditional depictions of the South. The dissenting voices of Gibbons and Kenan, who focus on gender, race, and sexuality, create fiction that is at once identifiably "southern" and also distinctly subversive. Gibbons's iconoclastic stance toward patriarchy, like the outsider's critique of community found in Kenan's work, proffers a portrait of the South unprecedented in the region's literature. Ford, McCarthy, and Hannah each approach the South's traditional notions of history and community with new irreverence and treat familiar southern topics in a distinctly postmodern manner. Whether through Ford's generic consumer landscape, the haunted netherworld of McCarthy's southern novels, or Hannah's riotous burlesque of the Civil War, these authors assail the philosophical and cultural foundations from which the Southern Renascence arose. Challenging the conventional conceptions of the southern canon, this is a provocative and innovative contribution to the region's literary study.

The Indian in American Southern Literature

Download The Indian in American Southern Literature PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108853285
Total Pages : 281 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (88 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Indian in American Southern Literature by : Melanie Benson Taylor

Download or read book The Indian in American Southern Literature written by Melanie Benson Taylor and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-16 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Indians are everywhere and nowhere in the US South. Cloaked by a rhetoric of disappearance after Indian Removal, actual southeastern tribal groups are largely invisible but immortalized in regional mythologies, genealogical lore, romanticized stereotypes, and unpronounceable place names. These imaginary 'Indians' compose an ideological fiction inextricable from that of the South itself. Often framed as hindrances to the Cotton Kingdom, Indians were in fact active participants in the plantation economy and chattel slavery before and after Removal. Dialectical tropes of Indigeneity linger in the white southern imagination in order to both conceal and expose the tangle of land, labor, and race as formative, disruptive categories of being and meaning. This book is not, finally, about the recovery of the region's lost Indians, but a reckoning with their inaccessible traces, ambivalent functions, and the shattering implications of their repressed significance for modern southern identity.

The Companion to Southern Literature

Download The Companion to Southern Literature PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780807126929
Total Pages : 1096 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (269 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Companion to Southern Literature by : Joseph M. Flora

Download or read book The Companion to Southern Literature written by Joseph M. Flora and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2001-11-01 with total page 1096 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Selected as an Outstanding Reference Source by the Reference and User Services Association of the American Library Association There are many anthologies of southern literature, but this is the first companion. Neither a survey of masterpieces nor a biographical sourcebook, The Companion to Southern Literature treats every conceivable topic found in southern writing from the pre-Columbian era to the present, referencing specific works of all periods and genres. Top scholars in their fields offer original definitions and examples of the concepts they know best, identifying the themes, burning issues, historical personalities, beloved icons, and common or uncommon stereotypes that have shaped the most significant regional literature in memory. Read the copious offerings straight through in alphabetical order (Ancestor Worship, Blue-Collar Literature, Caves) or skip randomly at whim (Guilt, The Grotesque, William Jefferson Clinton). Whatever approach you take, The Companion’s authority, scope, and variety in tone and interpretation will prove a boon and a delight. Explored here are literary embodiments of the Old South, New South, Solid South, Savage South, Lazy South, and “Sahara of the Bozart.” As up-to-date as grit lit, K Mart fiction, and postmodernism, and as old-fashioned as Puritanism, mules, and the tall tale, these five hundred entries span a reach from Lady to Lesbian Literature. The volume includes an overview of every southern state’s belletristic heritage while making it clear that the southern mind extends beyond geographical boundaries to form an essential component of the American psyche. The South’s lavishly rich literature provides the best means of understanding the region’s deepest nature, and The Companion to Southern Literature will be an invaluable tool for those who take on that exciting challenge. Description of Contents 500 lively, succinct articles on topics ranging from Abolition to Yoknapatawpha 250 contributors, including scholars, writers, and poets 2 tables of contents — alphabetical and subject — and a complete index A separate bibliography for most entries

Twentieth-Century Southern Literature

Download Twentieth-Century Southern Literature PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
ISBN 13 : 0813187400
Total Pages : 430 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (131 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Twentieth-Century Southern Literature by : J. A. BryantJr.

Download or read book Twentieth-Century Southern Literature written by J. A. BryantJr. and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-11-21 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Authors discussed include: Wendell Berry, Erskine Caldwell, Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Shelby Foote, Zora Neal Hurston, Bobbie Ann Mason, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor, William Styron, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Thomas Wolfe, Richard Wright, and many more. By World War II, the Southern Renaissance had established itself as one of the most significant literary events of the century, and today much of the best American fiction is southern fiction. Though the flowering of realistic and local-color writing during the first two decades of the century was a sign of things to come, the period between the two world wars was the crucial one for the South's literary development: a literary revival in Richmond came to fruition; at Vanderbilt University a group of young men produced The Fugitive, a remarkable, controversial magazine that published some of the century's best verse in its brief run; and the publication and widespread recognition of Faulkner (among others) inaugurated the great flood of southern writing that was to follow in novels, short stories, poetry, and plays. With more than forty years of experience writing and reading about the subject, and friendships with many of the figures discussed, J. A. Bryant is uniquely qualified to provide the first comprehensive account of southern American literature since 1900. Bryant pays attention to both the cultural and the historical context of the works and authors discussed, and presents the information in an enjoyable, accessible style. No lover of great American literature can afford to be without this book.

The History of Southern Literature

Download The History of Southern Literature PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780807112519
Total Pages : 626 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (125 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The History of Southern Literature by : Louis Decimus Rubin

Download or read book The History of Southern Literature written by Louis Decimus Rubin and published by Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The History of Southern Literature explores every facet of southern writing, including the works themselves, their authors and readers, literary trends, cultural movements, and political and economic influences. The extraordinary depth and scope of this monumental work--and its capacity to delight as well as instruct--make the book invaluable to anyone interested in southern letters.

The Future of Southern Letters

Download The Future of Southern Letters PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0195097823
Total Pages : 213 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (95 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Future of Southern Letters by : Jefferson Humphries

Download or read book The Future of Southern Letters written by Jefferson Humphries and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1996 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New South, though in constant flux, is still haunted by its Gothic ghosts; these essays explore how this paradox contributes to the preeminence of Southern writers.

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture

Download The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469616645
Total Pages : 534 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (696 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture by : M. Thomas Inge

Download or read book The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture written by M. Thomas Inge and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-02-01 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a comprehensive view of the South's literary landscape, past and present, this volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture celebrates the region's ever-flourishing literary culture and recognizes the ongoing evolution of the southern literary canon. As new writers draw upon and reshape previous traditions, southern literature has broadened and deepened its connections not just to the American literary mainstream but also to world literatures--a development thoughtfully explored in the essays here. Greatly expanding the content of the literature section in the original Encyclopedia, this volume includes 31 thematic essays addressing major genres of literature; theoretical categories, such as regionalism, the southern gothic, and agrarianism; and themes in southern writing, such as food, religion, and sexuality. Most striking is the fivefold increase in the number of biographical entries, which introduce southern novelists, playwrights, poets, and critics. Special attention is given to contemporary writers and other individuals who have not been widely covered in previous scholarship.

The Fourth Ghost

Download The Fourth Ghost PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780807133835
Total Pages : 440 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (338 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Fourth Ghost by : Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.

Download or read book The Fourth Ghost written by Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1949 classic Killers of the Dream, Lillian Smith described three racial "ghosts" haunting the mind of the white South: the black woman with whom the white man often had sexual relations, the rejected child from a mixed-race coupling, and the black mammy whom the white southern child first loves but then must reject. In this groundbreaking work, Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., extends Smith's work by adding a fourth "ghost" lurking in the psyche of the white South -- the specter of European Fascism. He explores how southern writers of the 1930s and 1940s responded to Fascism, and most tellingly to the suggestion that the racial politics of Nazi Germany had a special, problematic relevance to the South and its segregated social system. As Brinkmeyer shows, nearly all white southern writers in these decades felt impelled to deal with this specter and with the implications for southern identity of the issues raised by Nazism and Fascism. Their responses varied widely, ranging from repression and denial to the repulsion of self-recognition. With penetrating insight, Brinkmeyer examines the work of writers who contemplated the connection between the authoritarianism and racial politics of Nazi Germany and southern culture. He shows how white southern writers -- both those writing cultural criticism and those writing imaginative literature -- turned to Fascist Europe for images, analogies, and metaphors for representing and understanding the conflict between traditional and modern cultures that they were witnessing in Dixie. Brinkmeyer considers the works of a wide range of authors of varying political stripes: the Nashville Agrarians, W. J. Cash, Lillian Smith, William Alexander Percy, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, and Lillian Hellman. He argues persuasively that by engaging in their works the vital contemporary debates about totalitarianism and democracy, these writers reconfigured their understanding not only of the South but also of themselves as southerners, and of the nature and significance of their art. The magnum opus of a distinguished scholar, The Fourth Ghost offers a stunning reassessment of the cultural and political orientation of southern literature by examining a major and heretofore unexplored influence on its development.

Southern Writers

Download Southern Writers PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807148555
Total Pages : 498 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (71 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Southern Writers by : Joseph M. Flora

Download or read book Southern Writers written by Joseph M. Flora and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2006-06-21 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new edition of Southern Writers assumes its distinguished predecessor's place as the essential reference on literary artists of the American South. Broadly expanded and thoroughly revised, it boasts 604 entries-nearly double the earlier edition's-written by 264 scholars. For every figure major and minor, from the venerable and canonical to the fresh and innovative, a biographical sketch and chronological list of published works provide comprehensive, concise, up-to-date information. Here in one convenient source are the South's novelists and short story writers, poets and dramatists, memoirists and essayists, journalists, scholars, and biographers from the colonial period to the twenty-first century. What constitutes a "southern writer" is always a matter for debate. Editors Joseph M. Flora and Amber Vogel have used a generous definition that turns on having a significant connection to the region, in either a personal or literary sense. New to this volume are younger writers who have emerged in the quarter century since the dictionary's original publication, as well as older talents previously unknown or unacknowledged. For almost every writer found in the previous edition, a new biography has been commissioned. Drawn from the very best minds on southern literature and covering the full spectrum of its practitioners, Southern Writers is an indispensable reference book for anyone intrigued by the subject.

A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South

Download A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 0470756691
Total Pages : 672 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (77 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South by : Richard Gray

Download or read book A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South written by Richard Gray and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From slave narratives to the Civil War, and from country music to Southern sport, this Companion is the definitive guide to the literature and culture of the American South. Includes discussion of the visual arts, music, society, history, and politics in the region Combines treatment of major literary works and historical events with a survey of broader themes, movements and issues Explores the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Huston, Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty, as well as those - black and white, male and female - who are writing now Co-edited by the esteemed scholar Richard Gray, author of the acclaimed volume, A History of American Literature (Blackwell, 2003)

The Real South

Download The Real South PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807148067
Total Pages : 453 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (71 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Real South by : Scott Romine

Download or read book The Real South written by Scott Romine and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2008-06-01 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this stimulating study, Scott Romine explores the impact of globalization on contemporary southern culture and the South's persistence in an age of media and what he terms "cultural reproduction." Rather than being compromised, Romine asserts, southern cultures are both complicated and reconfigured as they increasingly detach from tradition in its conventional sense. In considering Souths that might appear fake -- the Souths of the theme restaurant, commercial television, and popular regional magazines, for example -- Romine contends that authenticity and reality emerge as central concepts that allow groups and individuals to imagine and navigate social worlds. Romine addresses a major critical problem -- "authenticity" -- in a fundamentally new manner. Less concerned with what actually constitutes an "authentic" or "real" South than in how these concepts are used today, The Real South explores a wide range of southern narratives that describe and travel through virtual, simulated, and commodified Souths. Where earlier critics have tended to assume a real or authentic South, Romine questions such assumptions and whether the "authentic South" ever truly existed. From Gone with the Wind, Civil War reenactments, and a tennis community outside Atlanta called Tara, to the work of Josephine Humphreys, the travel narrative of V. S. Naipaul, and the historical fiction of Lewis Nordan, Romine examines how narratives (and spaces) are used to fashion social solidarity and cultural continuity in a time of fragmentation and change. Far from deteriorating or disappearing in a global economy, Romine shows, the South continues to be reproduced and used by diverse groups engaged in diverse cultural projects.

Blood Meridian

Download Blood Meridian PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307762521
Total Pages : 349 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (77 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Blood Meridian by : Cormac McCarthy

Download or read book Blood Meridian written by Cormac McCarthy and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-08-11 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.

A Companion to American Literary Studies

Download A Companion to American Literary Studies PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 1119062519
Total Pages : 592 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (19 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis A Companion to American Literary Studies by : Caroline F. Levander

Download or read book A Companion to American Literary Studies written by Caroline F. Levander and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-08-17 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to American Literary Studies addresses the most provocative questions, subjects, and issues animating the field. Essays provide readers with the knowledge and conceptual tools for understanding American literary studies as it is practiced today, and chart new directions for the future of the subject. Offers up-to-date accounts of major new critical approaches to American literary studies Presents state-of-the-art essays on a full range of topics central to the field Essays explore critical and institutional genealogies of the field, increasingly diverse conceptions of American literary study, and unprecedented material changes such as the digital revolution A unique anthology in the field, and an essential resource for libraries, faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates