A Companion to American Literature and Culture

This expansive Companion to American Literature 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.