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The Global Remapping of American Literature

(Hardback)

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Publishing Details

Full Title:

The Global Remapping of American Literature

Contributors:

By (Author) Paul Giles

ISBN:

9780691136134

Publisher:

Princeton University Press

Imprint:

Princeton University Press

Publication Date:

4th April 2011

Country:

United States

Classifications

Readership:

Tertiary Education

Fiction/Non-fiction:

Non Fiction

Other Subjects:

Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000

Dewey:

810.932

Physical Properties

Physical Format:

Hardback

Number of Pages:

344

Dimensions:

Width 152mm, Height 235mm

Weight:

624g

Description

This book charts how the cartographies of American literature as an institutional category have varied radically across different times and places. Arguing that American literature was consolidated as a distinctively nationalist entity only in the wake of the U.S. Civil War, Paul Giles identifies this formation as extending until the beginning of the Reagan presidency in 1981. He contrasts this with the more amorphous boundaries of American culture in the eighteenth century, and with ways in which conditions of globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century have reconfigured the parameters of the subject. In light of these fluctuating conceptions of space, Giles suggests new ways of understanding the shifting territory of American literary history. ranging from Cotton Mather to David Foster Wallace, and from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Zora Neale Hurston. Giles considers why European medievalism and Native American prehistory were crucial to classic nineteenth-century authors such as Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville. He discusses how twentieth-century technological innovations, such as air travel, affected representations of the national domain in the texts of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. And he analyzes how regional projections of the South and the Pacific Northwest helped to shape the work of writers such as William Gilmore Simms, Jose Marti, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Gibson. Bringing together literary analysis, political history, and cultural geography, The Global Remapping of American Literature reorients the subject for the transnational era.

Reviews

Honorable Mention for the 2012 BAAS Book Prize, British Association of American Studies Shortlisted for the 2012 American Studies Network Prize "In this richly provocative study, Giles posits a protean map of the American imagination."--Choice "Paul Giles can arguably be considered one of the most significant non-host nation scholars of American writing and culture active today and, consequently is among the first rank of academic literary critics in the current moment. His recent The Global Remapping of American Literature simply stands as one of the high water marks for literary criticism in 2011 so far, and, despite Giles' continuing productivity, ought to be recognized as a career-marking bravura work of skilled reorganization of the field of American Studies itself."--Stephen Shapiro, Review of English Studies "The Global Remapping of American Literature was the first work from Paul Giles that I had the opportunity to read--it alone broadened my perspective on the work of the critic within the ever-shifting world of American literary studies."--Guy Risko, Symploke

Author Bio

Paul Giles is the Challis Professor of English at the University of Sydney. His many books include "Atlantic Republic" and "Virtual Americas".

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