Overview

The story of American literature and empire goes beyond the broad historical periodization of empire to reimagine that history. The central terms American and literature have always been tied up in US empire as well as other empires in the Americas. The word 'America,' itself the product of inter-imperial intellectual rivalry, claims the name of an entire hemisphere for one country therein. To understand the full history of American literature and empire is to recognize its deep, strategically obscure, and often disavowed imperial contexts that in turn require differentially transatlantic, hemispheric, and global frameworks of analysis. This collection thus takes a sceptical stance toward its own geographical referent. Literature has a long and continuing imperial history as empire's proxy. These essays cover canonical authors such as Cooper, Melville, Whitman, and Baldwin as well as lesser-known writers, including emergent artists focused on world-making with a reparative, speculative attention to the future.

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9781009739429

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Anna Brickhouse teaches English and American Studies at the University of Virginia. Her books include Earthquake and the Invention of America (Oxford 2024), supported by a Guggenheim, The Unsettlement of America (Oxford 2014), awarded the MLA's Lowell prize, and Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (Cambridge 2004). Susan Gillman teaches in the Literature Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her books, published by the University of Chicago Press include Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain's America (1989), Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (2003), honored by the MLA, and American Mediterraneans: A Study in Geography, History, and Race (2022).

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