A Companion to American Literature, 3 Volume Set

A comprehensive, chronological overview of American literature in three scholarly and authoritative volumes

A Companion to American Literature traces the history and development of American literature from its early origins in Native American oral tradition to 21^st century digital literature. This comprehensive three-volume set brings together contributions from a diverse international team of accomplished young scholars and established figures in the field.  Contributors explore a broad range of topics in historical, cultural, political, geographic, and technological contexts, engaging the work of both well-known and non-canonical writers of every period. 

Volume One is an inclusive and geographically expansive examination of early American literature, applying a range of cultural and historical approaches and theoretical models to a dramatically expanded canon of texts. Volume Two covers American literature between 1820 and 1914, focusing on the development of print culture and the literary marketplace, the emergence of various literary movements, and the impact of social and historical events on writers and writings of the period. Spanning the 20^th and early 21^st centuries, Volume Three studies traditional areas of American literature as well as the literature from previously marginalized groups and contemporary writers often overlooked by scholars. This inclusive and comprehensive study of American literature:

• Examines the influences of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and disability on American literature
• Discusses the role of technology in book production and circulation, the rise of literacy, and changing reading practices and literary forms
• Explores a wide range of writings in multiple genres, including novels, short stories, dramas, and a variety of poetic forms, as well as autobiographies, essays, lectures, diaries, journals, letters, sermons, histories, and graphic narratives.
• Provides a thematic index that groups chapters by contexts and illustrates their links across different traditional chronological boundaries

A Companion to American Literature is a valuable resource for students coming to the subject for the first time or preparing for field examinations, instructors in American literature courses, and scholars with more specialized interests in specific authors, genres, movements, or periods.

Susan Belasco is Professor Emerita and former Chair of the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska.

Theresa Strouth Gaul is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas.

Linck Johnson is the Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Colgate University, Hamilton, New York.

Michael Soto is Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of English at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas.

Volume I: Origins-1820

Full Table of Contents

Editors

Notes on Contributors to Volume I

General Introduction

Susan Belasco

Introduction to Volume I

Theresa Strouth Gaul

Chronology Origins-1820

1. The Storyteller's Universe: Indigenous Oral Literatures

Kenneth M. Roemer

2. Cross-Cultural Encounters in Early American Literatures: From Incommensurability to Exchange

Kelly Wisecup

3. Settlement Literatures Before and Beyond the Stories of Nations

Tamara Harvey

4. The Puritan Culture of Letters

Abram Van Engen

5. Writing the Salem Witch Trials

Peter J. Grund

6. Captivity:  From Babylon to Indian Country

Andrew Newman

7. Africans in Early America

Cassander L. Smith

8. Migration, Exile, Imperialism: The Non-English Literatures of Early America Reconsidered

Patrick M. Erben

9. Environment and Environmentalism

Timothy Sweet

10. Acknowledging Early American Poetry

Christopher N. Phillips

11. Travel Writings in Early America, 1680-1820

Susan C. Imbarrato

12. Early Native American Literacies to 1820: Systems of Meaning, Categories of Knowledge Transmission

Hilary E. Wyss

13. The Varieties of Religious Expression in Early American Literature

Sandra M. Gustafson

14. Benjamin Franklin: Printer, Editor, and Writer

Stephen Carl Arch

15. Writing Lives: Autobiography in Early America

Jennifer A. Desiderio

16. Captivity Recast: The Captivity Narrative in the Long Eighteenth Century

Jodi Schorb

17. Gender, Sex, and Seduction in Early American Literature

Ivy Schweitzer

18. Letters in Early American Manuscript and Print Cultures

Eve Tavor Bannet

19. Early American Evangelical Print Culture

Wendy Raphael Roberts

20. The First Black Atlantic: The Archive and Print Culture of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery

John Saillant

21. Manuscripts, Manufacts, and Social Authorship

Susan Stabile

22. Cosmopolitan Correspondences: The American Republic of Letters and the Circulation of Enlightenment Thought

Chiara Cillerai

23. Revolutionary Print Culture, 1763-1776

Philip Gould

24. Founding Documents: Writing the American into Being

Trish Loughran

25. From the Wharf to the Woods: The Development of U.S. Regional and National Publishing Networks, 1787-1820

Phillip H. Round

26. Performance, Theatricality, and Early American Drama

Laura L. Mielke

27. Charles Brockden Brown and the Novel in the 1790s

Philip Barnard, Mark L. Kamrath and Stephen Shapiro

28. Medicine, Disability, and Early American Literature

Sari Altschuler

29. Remapping the Canonical Interregnum: Periodization, Canonization, & the American Novel, 1800-1820

Duncan Faherty

30. Commerce, Class, and Cash:  Economics in Early American Literature

Elizabeth Hewitt

31. Haiti and the Early American Imagination

Michael J. Drexler

Index to Volume I

Volume II edited by: Linck Johnson

Volume II: 1820-1914

Editors

Notes on Contributors to Volume II

General Introduction

Susan Belasco

Introduction to Volume II

Linck Johnson

Chronology 1820-1914

1. The Transformation of Literary Production, 1820-1865 

Susan Belasco  

1. Travel Writing

Susan L. Roberson

1. The Historical Romance 

Monika M. Elbert and Leland S. Person

1. The Gothic Tale

Gerald Kennedy 

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Transcendentalism

Phyllis Cole

1. Henry David Thoreau and the Literature of the Environment 

Rochelle L. Johnson

1. Herman Melville and the Antebellum Reading Public

David O. Dowling

1. Women Writers at Midcentury

Nicole Tonkovich

1. Popular Poetry and the Rise of Anthologies 

Amanda Gailey

1. Walt Whitman and the New York Literary World   

  Edward Whitley

1. Emily Dickinson and the Tradition of Women Poets

Elizabeth A. Petrino

1. The Literature of Antebellum Reform 

Linck Johnson  

1. Sex, the Body, and Health Reform

David Greven

1. Proslavery and Antislavery Literature

Susan M. Ryan

1. Gender and the Construction of Antebellum Slave Narratives

Venetria Patton and Philathia Bolton

1. Antebellum Oratory

John C. Briggs

1. Literature and the Civil War

Shirley Samuels

1. Disability and Literature

Mary Klages

1. The Development of Print Culture, 1865-1914

William Hardwig

1. Local Color and the Rise of Regionalism  

Anne Boyd Rioux

1. Poetry, Periodicals, and the Marketplace 

Nadia Nurhussein

1. Realism from William Dean Howells to Edith Wharton

Alfred Bendixen

1. Mark Twain and the Idea of American Identity

Andrew Levy

1. Henry James at Home and Abroad

John Carlos Rowe

1. Naturalism

Donna Campbell

1. Social Protest Fiction

Alicia Mischa Renfroe

1. The Immigrant Experience

James Nagel

1. Double Consciousness: African American Writers at the Turn of the Century

Shirley Moody-Turner

1. Native American Voices 

Cari Carpenter

1. Latina/o Voices

Jesse Alemán

1. The Emergence of an American Drama, 1820-1914 

Cheryl Black

Index to Volume II

Volume III: 1914-Present

Editors

Notes on Contributors to Volume III

General Introduction

Susan Belasco

Introduction to Volume III

Michael Soto

Chronology 1914-Present

1. Magazines, Little and Large: American Print Culture in the Early Twentieth Century

Jayne E. Marek

1. Regional Literary Expressions

Philip Joseph

1. The Literature of the U.S. South: Modernism and Beyond

John Wharton Lowe

1. American Literature and the Academy

Eric Bennett

1. The Literature of World War I

Hazel Hutchison

1. The Course of Modern American Poetry

Charles Altieri

1. Modernism and the American Novel

Linda Wagner-Martin

1. The Little Theatre Movement

DeAnna M. Toten Beard

1. The Lost Generation and American Expatriatism

Michael Soto

1. The Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro

Maureen Honey

1. Proletarian Literature

Barbara Foley

1. Realism in American Drama

Brenda Murphy

1. Nature Writing and the New Environmentalism

Karla Armbruster

1. The Literature and Film of World War II

Philip Beidler

1. The Beat Minds of Their Generation

David Sterritt

1. The Black Arts Movement and the Racial Divide

Amy Abugo Ongiri

1. Literary Self-Fashioning in the Pharmacological Age: Confessional Poetry

Michael Thurston

1. New Frontiers in Postmodern Theater

Kerstin Schmidt

1. Poetry at the End of the Millennium

John Lowney

1. The Literature and Film of the Vietnam War

Mark A. Heberle

1. Gay and Lesbian Literature

Guy Davidson

1. American Literature in Languages Other than English

Steven G. Kellman

1. Jewish American Literary Forms

Victoria Aarons

1. Native American Literary Forms

Thomas C. Gannon

1. Asian American Literary Forms

Una Chung

1. Latina/o Literary Forms

Marta Caminero-Santangelo

1. African American Fiction After Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Michael Hill

1. Creative Nonfictions

Barrie Jean Borich

1. The Rise and Nature of the Graphic Novel

Stephen E. Tabachnick

1. The Digital Revolution and the Future of American Reading

Naomi S. Baron

Index  to Volume III

Consolidated Index

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