Table of Contents

Cover

Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

Acknowledgments

Part I: Forms

1 Poetry, Prose, and the Politics of Literary Form

2 The Critical Work of American Literature

Franklin’s Systemic Reading Lessons: Capitalism as Cannibalism

Hawthorne’s Systemic Reading Lessons: The Whole System of Society

Afterword: A Note on the Creative Work of American Literature

3 Women’s Worlds in the Nineteenth-Century US Novel

Rich and Famous – and Happy?

Children

Names in Public

Tutelage

Danger

Conclusion: Our Nig and the Labor of Women’s Writing

4 The Secularization Narrative and Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Thirsting for Knowledge: Wieland and the End of Epistemology

Prophecy and Sacred American History in The Book of Mormon

Begetting and Believing: Du Bois’s Genealogy

5 Literatures of Technology, Technologies of Literature

Emerson’s Question Concerning Technology

Franklin’s Technology of the Self

The Work of Art in the Age of Iron Mills and the Dynamo

Epilogue: The Digital Future

6 Excluded Middles: Social Inequality in American Literature

7 Narrative Medicine, Biocultures, and the Visualization of Health and Disease

From Narrative Medicine to Biocultures

Medicine’s Visual Culture

Conclusion

8 Performance Anxieties: The A-Literary Companions of American Literary Studies

Ages and Stages

Performing Anxiety

9 Drama, Theatre, and Performance before O’Neill

10 Disliking It: American Poetry and American Literary Studies

11 After the New Americanists: The Progress of Romance and the Romance of Progress in American Literary Studies

12 Mass Media and Literary Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Part II: Spaces

13 Cabeza de Vaca, Lope de Oviedo, and Americas Exceptionalism

14 Worlding America: The Hemispheric Text-Network

Benito Cereno and the Hemispheric Text-Network

Antecedents without Influences: Hugo’s Bug-Jargal

Spanish: Everyone’s Language of Conspiracy

The Translator in the Network: Ritchie’s The Slave-King

Descendants, Antecedents, and Precedents C.L.R. James in the Text-Network

15 Worlds of Color, Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in Early American Literary History

The Picture of Human Life in The Scarlet Letter

Revisiting the World of The Scarlet Letter Today

16 Transatlantic Returns

Space and Time

Periodization

17 American Literature in Transnational Perspective: The Case of Mark Twain

18 Southern Literary Studies

The South: World and Nation

The South Not Itself

The New Southern Studies

An End to Southern Studies?

19 New Regionalisms: US-Caribbean Literary Relations

20 American Literature as Ecosystem: The Examples of Euclides da Cunha and Cormac McCarthy

The Natural Sciences and Ecosystems

Euclides da Cunha and the Law of Extraterritoriality

McCarthy, Biocentrism, and Literature as Ecosystem

21 Settler States of Feeling: National Belonging and the Erasure of Native American Presence

The Affective Life of Jurisdiction

Citizenship and Its Discontents

22 Tribal Nations and the Other Territories of American Indian Literary History

The Territories of Tribal Nation Writing

International Indigeneity

23 Globalization

Part III: Practices

24 Democratic Cultures and the First Century of US Literature

Democratic Conflict and Early US Literature

Frontier Democracy

Self Culture versus Interpersonal Democracy

Conclusion: Democracy

25 American Literature and Law

26 Sexuality and American Literary Studies

27 Exquisite Fragility: Human Being in the Aftermath of War

28 The Posthuman Turn: Rewriting Species in Recent American Literature

The Alien Moment

The Cyborg Moment

The Animal Moment

29 Narrative and Intellectual Disability

30 Reading for Asian American Literature

New Directions for Literary History

Asian American Historiographic Fictions

31 Untangling Genealogy’s Tangled Skeins: Alexander Crummell, James McCune Smith, and Nineteenth-Century Black Literary Traditions

Special Destiny of the Negro

Deconstructing Race: Du Bois’s Challengers, Alexander Crummell, and James McCune Smith

Back to the Future

32 Speculative Realism and the Postrace Aesthetic in Contemporary American Fiction

A New Postrace Generation

The Meaning of “Postrace”

Percival Everett’s Erasure

The Appeal of Black Pathology

My Pafology

The Novel’s Postrace and Post-Postmodern Dilemma

The Multidimensional Protagonist

Sous Rature

The Postrace Aesthetic in a Post-Postmodern World

33 The New Life of the New Forms: American Literary Studies and the Digital Humanities

Electronic Imaginative Compositions

Analysis

Archives

Politics and Institutions

Conclusion: “The Lands to Be Welded Together”

Acknowledgments

Index

Download CD/DVD content