A comprehensive, chronological overview of American literature in three scholarly and authoritative volumes
A Companion to American Literature traces the history and development of American literature from its early origins in Native American oral tradition to 21st century digital literature. This comprehensive three-volume set brings together contributions from a diverse international team of accomplished young scholars and established figures in the field. Contributors explore a broad range of topics in historical, cultural, political, geographic, and technological contexts, engaging the work of both well-known and non-canonical writers of every period.
Volume One is an inclusive and geographically expansive examination of early American literature, applying a range of cultural and historical approaches and theoretical models to a dramatically expanded canon of texts. Volume Two covers American literature between 1820 and 1914, focusing on the development of print culture and the literary marketplace, the emergence of various literary movements, and the impact of social and historical events on writers and writings of the period. Spanning the 20th and early 21st centuries, Volume Three studies traditional areas of American literature as well as the literature from previously marginalized groups and contemporary writers often overlooked by scholars. This inclusive and comprehensive study of American literature:
A Companion to American Literature is a valuable resource for students coming to the subject for the first time or preparing for field examinations, instructors in American literature courses, and scholars with more specialized interests in specific authors, genres, movements, or periods.
Chapter 1. The Storyteller’s Universe: Indigenous Oral Literatures
Chapter 3. Settlement Literatures Before and Beyond the Stories of Nations
Chapter 4. The Puritan Culture of Letters
Chapter 5. Writing the Salem Witch Trials
Chapter 6. Captivity: From Babylon to Indian Country
Chapter 7. Africans in Early America
Chapter 8. Migration, Exile, Imperialism: The Non‐English Literatures of Early America Reconsidered
Chapter 9. Environment and Environmentalism
Chapter 10. Acknowledging Early American Poetry
Chapter 11. Travel Writings in Early America, 1680–1820
Chapter 13. The Varieties of Religious Expression in Early American Literature
Chapter 14. Benjamin Franklin: Printer, Editor, and Writer
Chapter 15. Writing Lives: Autobiography in Early America
Chapter 16. Captivity Recast: The Captivity Narrative in the Long Eighteenth Century
Chapter 17. Gender, Sex, and Seduction in Early American Literature
Chapter 18. Letters in Early American Manuscript and Print Cultures
Chapter 19. Early American Evangelical Print Culture
Chapter 21. Manuscripts, Manufacts, and Social Authorship
Chapter 23. Revolutionary Print Culture, 1763–1776
Chapter 24. Founding Documents: Writing the United States into Being
Chapter 26. Performance, Theatricality, and Early American Drama
Chapter 27. Charles Brockden Brown and the Novel in the 1790s
Chapter 28. Medicine, Disability, and Early American Literature
Chapter 30. Commerce, Class, and Cash: Economics in Early American Literature
Chapter 31. Haiti and the Early American Imagination
Chapter 1. The Transformation of Literary Production, 1820–1865
Chapter 3. The Historical Romance
Chapter 5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Transcendentalism
Chapter 6. Henry David Thoreau and the Literature of the Environment
Chapter 7. Herman Melville and the Antebellum Reading Public
Chapter 8. Women Writers at Midcentury
Chapter 9. Popular Poetry and the Rise of Anthologies
Chapter 10. Walt Whitman and the New York Literary World
Chapter 11. Emily Dickinson and the Tradition of Women Poets
Chapter 12. The Literature of Antebellum Reform
Chapter 13. Sex, the Body, and Health Reform
Chapter 14. Proslavery and Antislavery Literature
Chapter 15. Gender and the Construction of Antebellum Slave Narratives
Chapter 16. Antebellum Oratory
Chapter 17. Literature and the Civil War
Chapter 18. Disability and Literature
Chapter 19. The Development of Print Culture, 1865–1914
Chapter 20. Local Color and the Rise of Regionalism
Chapter 21. Poetry, Periodicals, and the Marketplace
Chapter 22. Realism from William Dean Howells to Edith Wharton
Chapter 23. Mark Twain and the Idea of American Identity
Chapter 24. Henry James at Home and Abroad
Chapter 26. Social Protest Fiction
Chapter 27. The Immigrant Experience
Chapter 28. Double Consciousness: African American Writers at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Chapter 29. Native American Voices
Chapter 31. The Emergence of an American Drama, 1820–1914
Chronology: 1914 to the Present
Chapter 1. Magazines, Little and Large: American Print Culture in the Early Twentieth Century
Chapter 2. Regional Literary Expressions
Chapter 3. The Literature of the US South: Modernism and Beyond
Chapter 4. American Literature and the Academy
Chapter 5. The Literature of World War I
Chapter 6. The Course of Modern American Poetry
Chapter 7. Modernism and the American Novel
Chapter 8. The Little Theater Movement
Chapter 9. The Lost Generation and American Expatriatism
Chapter 10. The Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro
Chapter 11. Proletarian Literature
Chapter 12. Realism in American Drama
Chapter 13. Nature Writing and the New Environmentalism
Chapter 14. The Literature and Film of World War II
Chapter 15. The Beat Minds of Their Generation
Chapter 16. The Black Arts Movement and the Racial Divide
Chapter 17. Literary Self‐Fashioning in the Pharmacological Age: Confessional Poetry
Chapter 18. New Frontiers in Postmodern Theater
Chapter 19. Poetry at the End of the Millennium
Chapter 20. The Literature and Film of the Vietnam War
Chapter 21. Gay and Lesbian Literature
Chapter 22. American Literature in Languages Other than English
Chapter 23. Jewish American Literary Forms
Chapter 24. Native American Literary Forms
Chapter 25. Asian American Literary Forms
Chapter 26. Latina/o Literary Forms
Chapter 27. African American Fiction After Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Chapter 28. Creative Nonfictions
Chapter 29. The Rise and Nature of the Graphic Novel
Chapter 30. The Digital Revolution and the Future of American Reading