The global remapping of American literature [[electronic resource] /] / Paul Giles

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910791566403321
• Autore: Giles Paul
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Princeton, N.J., : Princeton University Press, 2010
• ISBN: 1-282-96451-8; 9786612964510; 1-4008-3651-4
• Edizione: [Course Book]
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (340 p.)
• Disciplina: 810.9/32
• Soggetti: American literature - History and criticism; Geography in literature; Boundaries in literature; Space in literature; Regionalism in literature; National characteristics, American, in literature; United States In literature
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Introduction: the deterritorialization of American literature -- Part one: Temporal latitudes. Augustan American literature: an aesthetics of extravagance; medieval American literature: antebellum narratives and the "map of the infinite" -- Part two: The boundaries of the nation. The arcs of modernism: geography as allegory; suburb, network, homeland: national space and the rhetoric of broadcasting -- Part three: Spatial longitudes. Hemispheric parallax: South America and the American South; metaregionalism: the global pacific northwest -- Conclusion: American literature and the question of circumference.
• Sommario/riassunto: 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, José Martí, 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.