Shades of the planet : American literature as world literature

Resource Information

The work Shades of the planet : American literature as world literature represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Shades of the planet : American literature as world literature

Title remainder

American literature as world literature

Statement of responsibility

edited by Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell

Contributor

• Buell, Lawrence
• Dimock, Wai-chee, 1953-

Subject

• American literature -- Foreign influences
• American literature -- History and criticism
• Boundaries in literature
• Geography in literature
• Globalization in literature
• Multiculturalism in literature

Language

eng

Summary

In a globalizing age, studying American literature in isolation from the rest of the world seems less and less justified. But is the conceptual box of the nation dispensable? What would American literature look like without it? Leading scholars take up this debate in this book, beginning not with the United States as center, but with the world as circumference. This reversed frame yields a surprising landscape, alive with traces of West Africa, Eastern Europe, Iran, Iraq, India, China, Mexico, and Australia. The Broadway musical Oklahoma! has aboriginal antecedents; Black English houses an African syntax; American slavery consorts with the Holocaust; Philip Roth keeps company with Milan Kundera; the crime novel moves south of the border; and R.P. Blackmur lectures in Japan. A national literature becomes haunted by the world when that literature is seen extending to the Pacific, opening up to Islam, and accompanying African-American authors as they travel. Highlighting American literature as a fold in a planet-wide fabric, this pioneering volume transforms the field, redrawing its institutional as well as geographical map. The contributors are Rachel Adams, Jonathan Arac, Homi Bhabha, Lawrence Buell, Wai Chee Dimock, Susan Stanford Friedman, Paul Giles, David Palumbo-Liu, Ross Posnock, Joseph Roach, and Eric J. Sundquist

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

810.9

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

LC call number

PS157

LC item number

.S53 2007

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography