This collection of essays offers a coherent view of (North)American
literary and cultural history from the times of James Fenimore Cooper to
the present. Its focus is mainly on the novel and on poetry, but it also
inquires into the relation between genres and discourses: between
literature and painting, realism and the beginnings of American
sociology, between fiction and the political rhetoric of expansion.
Historically, it explores especially three periods of American
literature and culture: the late-nineteenth century and the transition
from Victorianism to the modern era, the forms and peculiarities of
American literary modernism, and postmodern fiction (especially the work
of Pynchon, Coover, and DeLillo). Within these areas of interest it
emphasizes the rise and development of the American city novel as well
as the different literary representations of the Canadian and U.S.
American experience of the frontier and of the city. Thus the book gives
evidence of the richness and diversity of American cultural expression,
yet also of an academic lifetime's fascination with, and commitment to,
American Studies.