Shades of the Planet
Subtitle: American Literature as World Literature
Contributors: Wai Chee Dimock (Editor); Lawrence Buell (Editor)
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: March 26, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 312
ISBN-13: 9780691128511
Subjects: Literary studies: general; Literary Criticism; Literature - Classics / Criticism; English; USA; American - General; American Language and Literature; Comparative Literature; Literary Criticism & Collections / American; American literature; Boundaries in literature; Foreign influences; History and criticism
Description: In a globalizing age, studying American literature in isolation from the rest of the world seems less and less justified. But is the conceptual box of the nation dispensable? What would American literature look like without it? Leading scholars take up this debate in this book, beginning not with the United States as center, but with the world as circumference. This reversed frame yields a surprising landscape, alive with traces of West Africa, Eastern Europe, Iran, Iraq, India, China, Mexico, and Australia. The Broadway musical Oklahoma! has aboriginal antecedents; Black English houses an African syntax; American slavery consorts with the Holocaust; Philip Roth keeps company with Milan Kundera; the crime novel moves south of the border; and R.P. Blackmur lectures in Japan. A national literature becomes haunted by the world when that literature is seen extending to the Pacific, opening up to Islam, and accompanying African-American authors as they travel. Highlighting American literature as a fold in a planet-wide fabric, this pioneering volume transforms the field, redrawing its institutional as well as geographical map. The contributors are Rachel Adams, Jonathan Arac, Homi Bhabha, Lawrence Buell, Wai Chee Dimock, Susan Stanford Friedman, Paul Giles, David Palumbo-Liu, Ross Posnock, Joseph Roach, and Eric J. Sundquist.