A Companion to American Literature is divided into three volumes – “Origins to 1820,” “1820–1914,” and “1914 to the Present” – each of which contains more than 30 chapters designed to aid twenty‐first‐century readers negotiate the rich and complex terrain of writings produced in the geographical region that became the United States. Beginning with the oral traditions of Native American peoples, these volumes trace the development of an American literature from the colonial period through the growth and rapid expansion of a vibrant print culture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the emergence of electronic literature in the early years of the twenty‐first century. At the same time, these volumes often challenge and complicate traditional notions of what constitutes and characterizes an “American literature,” a concept that has been under construction since the earliest years of the Republic. Certainly, the contributors to A Companion to American Literature take full advantage of the innovative research and scholarship of the last few decades, including significant archival work made possible by digital technologies; the recovery of a host of women and minority writers; important findings of book history, which includes new understanding of literary production and circulation; original theoretical formulations that question linear narratives of literary‐historical development; and fresh ideas about the transnational and geopolitical nature of the United States.
Readers of the Companion will come away with a deep appreciation of the complexities involved in this ambitious project, as well as with a strong sense of the rich yields of such an inclusive approach to American literature. In various ways, the chapters in each volume address the social, political, geographic, domestic, and material contexts in which American literature has been produced and in which it is firmly grounded. A number of chapters describe the impact of the transformations in book and periodical production, the development of circulation and distribution systems, the rise of literacy, changing reading practices, trends in new media, new literary forms, and the influence of popular culture on literature. The important influences of race, ethnicity, gender, identity, and class on American literature are a central part of many chapters, and the contributions of women, Native peoples, African Americans, Spanish‐speaking populations, and a variety of immigrant groups are emphasized throughout the Companion. Further, many contributors take up the complexity of the transatlantic, transpacific, and trans‐central networks and connections that were and are important to the construction of an American literature. While the emphasis is on imaginative, published writing and the traditional genres of fiction, poetry, drama, and non‐fictional prose, especially life writing, contributors also consider the importance of oral traditions, as well as other kinds of writing crucial to the development of American literature, such as diaries, journals, letters, sermons and tracts, prayers, and histories. Our contributors have been committed to providing discussions of the most read and studied writers as well as providing introductions to the works of non‐canonical writers integral to an inclusive, comprehensive, and historically accurate study of American literature. Finally, many chapters not only catalogue what we know or how we have traditionally approached a field but also indicate developing fields of inquiry right now and suggest, insofar as we can anticipate them, scholarly trends in the years to come.
In her introduction, Theresa Strouth Gaul, the editor of Volume I, points to the “extraordinary flourishing, dynamism, and innovation of early American literary studies,” which have moved well beyond earlier models that generally began with the English Puritan settlement of New England and ended with the major political writers of the American Revolution. She rightly credits early literary histories with establishing the “richness of the field of early American literature” and traces the major changes that have taken place in our understanding of the cultural environment of Indigenous peoples and the earliest colonial settlers. In this conception, the canon, both figures and texts, is dramatically expanded to include “a larger range of people, communicative modes, geographical regions, and temporal moments.” The contributors to Volume I, beginning with chapters on Indigenous oral literature and cross‐cultural encounters in the early years of exploration and settlement, write broadly about the varieties of literary forms that were produced by an extensive range of people from many regions – geographic, linguistic, cultural, and social. While long‐established figures such as William Bradford, Anne Bradstreet, Benjamin Franklin, and Charles Brockden Brown receive ample attention, other chapters are devoted to writers who have more recently entered the canon, including Olaudah Equiano, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, Samson Occom, Susanna Rowson, and Phillis Wheatley. Contributors also provide detailed commentary about a whole host of other voices and movements, including, for example, the impact of Portugal’s fifteenth‐century slave trade on African experiences in America; the importance of non‐Anglophone histories and languages on literature; the impact of collaborative rather single authorship on texts that we study; expanded categories of literature, such as captivity narratives, letters, and manuscript books, that move readers beyond the traditional literary genres; as well as fresh examinations of the influence of religious history and culture on the earliest American literature. The contributors to Volume I make a strong case for the reconsideration of the earliest American literature in light of a kaleidoscope of approaches and methods to reveal a rich and engaging body of works that move readers far beyond what Gaul refers to as the “Puritans‐to‐Revolution master narrative of early American literature.”
Linck Johnson, the editor of Volume II, begins his introduction by evoking a famous incident in literary history. In the Edinburgh Review in 1820, the British writer and clergyman Sydney Smith contemptuously asked, “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?” Taken up by writers, reviewers, readers, and all manner of thinkers about the nature of the United States and its literature, that question reverberated throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Smith’s question served as a touchstone for the progress of American literature from 1820 to 1914, by which time it had come into its own through the efforts of a wide variety of diverse writers responding to the social, political, economic, and cultural changes of the period, especially the upheavals of the years before and after the Civil War. Johnson stresses that the volume charts “the ways in which the country’s literature began to mirror the full diversity of society and culture in the United States.” While individual chapters focus on the work of major figures such as Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, and Henry James, other chapters explore the connections between the work of well‐known authors and their significant but lesser‐known contemporaries, for example Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau and Susan Fenimore Cooper, and Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. The work of a host of other authors is also considered, including a wide range of African American, Native American, Latina/o, and immigrant writers, some of whom wrote in languages other than English. Indeed, the volume has been powerfully shaped by ongoing work in a number of often related areas: efforts to recover the writings of women and people of color; scholarship on the development of the literary marketplace and the impact of social protest and reform movements, especially abolitionism and women’s rights; and theoretical studies concerning the body and sexuality, disability, gender, and race. Drawing together these and other recent strands of scholarship, the contributors to Volume II create a lively depiction of American literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in all its diversity and complexity. As Johnson explains, by the end of the period covered in the volume, “the challenging question was no longer ‘who reads an American book?’ but rather ‘what constitutes an American book, or indeed an American?’”
In his introduction, Michael Soto, the editor of Volume III, is also concerned with what constitutes “American literature,” in this case a national literature that had, in the early years of the twentieth century, become a “fully professionalized” study in schools, colleges, and universities. Soto outlines the thinking of the early scholars of American literature who divided the twentieth century into “modern,” the years after World War I, and “postmodern,” the years after World War II. While it continues to operate as a useful marker, that distinction was largely based on a literary canon that was primarily white and male. As Soto observes, scholarship in the last five decades, especially the work of feminist scholars, has been devoted to expanding the canon and providing a more accurate view of the literature written in the United States during the twentieth and early twenty‐first century. Just as contributors to the first and second volumes have benefited from the extensive archaeological and archival research that has complicated the notion that American identity and culture was fundamentally forged by the Puritan founders of New England, contributors to this volume have, as Soto explains, produced a literary‐historical map that differs markedly from the one so confidently drawn by literary scholars early in the twentieth century. The contributors to this third volume have likewise taken advantage of a variety of new ways of thinking about social, economic, political, and cultural change – and the ways in which those ideas impact writers and literary works. The works of many familiar writers are discussed within these chapters – for example, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Tennessee Williams, and Ralph Ellison, as well as more recently canonized figures such as Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, and Sherman Alexie. At the same time, chapters address a variety of topics and themes such as proletarian literature, which takes up the challenges to capitalism in the 1930s; women writers and the origins of the Harlem Renaissance; nature writing and environmentalism; Asian American and Native American literary forms; and the graphic novel as a new literary form. As in the other volumes, the technologies of reading and literary production are clearly addressed. This volume thus concludes with a dynamic discussion of digital technology and the future of reading and literature in the United States.
Each of the volumes of the Companion includes a full Table of Contents for all three volumes, a Table of Contents for the individual volume, notes on the editors and contributors, and a general introduction to the entire three volumes, followed by an introduction to the individual volume written by the volume editor. That, in turn, is followed by a chronology that connects the publication of literary events with significant historical events of that year, designed to serve as a guide and handy reference for readers. Each chapter in the volume includes a list of references and, in most cases, an annotated list of further reading in both print and electronic resources. Finally, the volumes conclude with a general index for easy reference.
The editors of this project owe our major debt of gratitude to our contributors, all of whom are outstanding scholars and committed educators. We are grateful to everyone for their professionalism and their cooperation, as we worked on this large and complex project. We also want to recognize our colleagues at Wiley Blackwell – Emma Bennett, who first contacted Susan Belasco with the idea of a Companion to American Literature, the several anonymous reviewers who provided helpful feedback on the initial proposal, as well as the other editors and staff members with whom we have worked: Deirdre Ilkson, Ben Thatcher, Rebecca Harkin, Liz Wingett, Dominic Bibby, and, most importantly, Catriona King, Publisher for the Humanities.