The Global Remapping of American Literature

by Paul Giles

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691180786
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	06/12/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Deterritorialization of American Literature 1

Part One: Temporal Latitudes
Chapter 1: Augustan American Literature: An Aesthetics of Extravagance 29
Restoration Legacies: Cook and Byrd 29
The Plantation Epic: Magnalia Christi Americana 42
New World Topographies: Wheatley, Dwight, Alsop 55
Chapter 2: Medieval American Literature: Antebellum Narrativesand the "Map of the Infinite" 70
Emerson, Longfellow, and the Longue Durée 70
"Medieval" Mound Builders and the Archaeological Imagination 86
Hawthorne, Melville, and the Question of Genealogy 97

Part Two: The Boundaries of the Nation
Chapter 3: The Arcs of Modernism: Geography as Allegory 111
Postbellum Cartographies: William Dean Howells 111
Ethnic Palimpsests, National Standards 120
"Description without Place": Stevens, Stein, and Modernist Geographies 125
Chapter 4: Suburb, Network, Homeland: National Spaceand the Rhetoric of Broadcasting 141
"Voice of America": Roth, Morrison, DeLillo 141
Lost in Space: John Updike 154
The MTV Generation: Wallace and Eggers 161

Part Three: Spatial Longitudes
Chapter 5: Hemispheric Parallax: South Americaand the American South 183
Rotating Perspectives: Bartram, Simms, Martí 183
Regionalism and Pseudo-geography: Hurston and Bishop 199
Mississippi Vulgate: Faulkner and Barthelme 212
Chapter 6: Metaregionalism: The Global Pacific Northwest 223
Reversible Coordinates: The Epistemology of Space 223
Orient and Orientation: Snyder, Le Guin, Brautigan 232
Virtual Canadas: Gibson and Coupland 242
Conclusion: American Literature and theQuestion of Circumference 255

Works Cited 269
Index 305

What People are Saying About This

Pease

This timely and inclusive book reconfigures the coordinates of the entire field of American literature for the transnational epoch. Scrupulously researched, it inaugurates a wholly alternative mode of understanding and is bound to provoke argument and discussion. Giles's engaging prose is a pleasure to read.
— Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College

From the Publisher

"This timely and inclusive book reconfigures the coordinates of the entire field of American literature for the transnational epoch. Scrupulously researched, it inaugurates a wholly alternative mode of understanding and is bound to provoke argument and discussion. Giles's engaging prose is a pleasure to read."—Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College

"There is no question that this ambitious book will find a wide readership among those in the fields of American literature and American studies. It brilliantly covers an impressive range of texts and offers new and provocative insights. Rich in detail, its implications for the study of American literature are decisive and far reaching."—Leonard Tennenhouse, Duke University

Leonard Tennenhouse

There is no question that this ambitious book will find a wide readership among those in the fields of American literature and American studies. It brilliantly covers an impressive range of texts and offers new and provocative insights. Rich in detail, its implications for the study of American literature are decisive and far-reaching.
— Leonard Tennenhouse, Duke University

Editorial Reviews

"In this richly provocative study, Giles posits a protean map of the American imagination."

Choice

Honorable Mention for the 2012 BAAS Book Prize, British Association of American Studies

Shortlisted for the 2012 American Studies Network Prize

From the Publisher

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.

Symploke - Guy Risko

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.

Review of English Studies - Stephen Shapiro

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