A Companion to American Literature and Culture - (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture) by Paul Lauter (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This expansive Companion offers a set of fresh perspectives on the wealth of texts produced in and around what is now the United States.

• Highlights the diverse voices that constitute American literature, embracing oral traditions, slave narratives, regional writing, literature of the environment, and more
• Demonstrates that American literature was multicultural before Europeans arrived on the continent, and even more so thereafter
• Offers three distinct paradigms for thinking about American literature, focusing on: genealogies of American literary study; writers and issues; and contemporary theories and practices
• Enables students and researchers to generate richer, more varied and more comprehensive readings of American literature

From the Back Cover

A COMPANION TO AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

The expansive Companion to American Literature and Culture provides a set of fresh perspectives, some related, some dissonant, on the wealth of texts produced in and around what is now the United States. Written by experts in the field, the Companion embraces the many different voices that constitute American literature, from slave narratives and oral tales to regional writing and literature of the environment. It demonstrates that American literature was multicultural before Europeans arrived on the continent, and even more so thereafter.

The three sections of the book offer three distinctive paradigms for thinking about American literature. The first section draws attention to the ways in which American literature has been constructed and studied at differing moments and by different groups of people. The second looks at the literary production of individual authors and at groups of writers who interacted with one another. The final section examines the interactions between contemporary forms of creative expression and the theories that inform and are, in turn, shaped by such writing.

Review Quotes

"I believe this book is well worth dipping into. It is, I suggest, a volume of solid scholarship that should have a significant impact in what is already a quite crowded publishing area. It is highly recommended, if only for the reason that--as Lauter explains--'the literatures of this America illuminate as nothing else has done the aspirations, the contradictions, the dangers and possibilities of this society'" (M/C Reviews, November 2010)

About the Author

Paul Lauter is Allan K. and Gwendolyn Miles Smith Professor of Literature Emeritus at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He has served as President of the American Studies Association (of the United States), and he is General Editor of the groundbreaking Heath Anthology of American Literature, now in its seventh edition.