Books in the Routledge Transnational Perspectives on American Literature series

Examines the development of literary constructions of Irish-American identity from the mid-nineteenth century arrival of the Famine generation through the Great Depression.

This volume, by recognizing the complexity of cultural production in both its diasporic and national contexts, seeks a nuanced critical approach in order to look ahead to the future of transnational literary studies. The majority of the chapters, written by literary and ethnic studies scholars, analyze ethnic literatures of the United States which, given the nation¿s history of slavery and immigration, form an integral part of mainstream American literature today. While the primary focus is literary, the chapters analyze their specific topics from perspectives drawn from several disciplines, including cultural studies and history. This book is an exciting and insightful resource for scholars with interests in transnationalism, American literature and ethnic studies.

Presents an account of Don DeLillo's writing, situating his oeuvre within an analysis of the condition of contemporary fiction, and dealing with his work in relation to contemporary political and economic concerns. This book provides a reading of DeLillo's ambivalent engagement with American and European culture.

Examines how African American writers, often traveling to the margins of a nineteenth and early twentieth-century US Empire, developed sets of cross-racial, cross-national identifications, sympathies and alliances that caused them to challenge dominant ideas of US nationalism, democracy and citizenship.

Establishes a link between the western American writers, Wallace Stegner and Cormac McCarthy. This book examines the treatment of landscape and nature in their works, suggesting that they exemplify perspectives which are related to their authors' historical positions before and after the cultural watershed of the Vietnam era.

Examines the American cultural and literary preoccupation with Asia, exploring the corresponding historical-political situations - including China's Cultural Revolution and Japanese geisha culture - that have both circumscribed and enabled greater cultural and political contact between Asia and America.

Explores the confluences between two types of literature in contemporary America: the novel and the epic. This work analyses the tradition of the epic as it has evolved from antiquity, through Joyce to its American manifestations and describes how this tradition has impacted upon contemporary American writing.

Through key literary works of revolutionary and early national America by writers, this book shows how American national character was born and remained in bitter debate in the nation's formative years.

What is transnationalism and how does it affect American literature? This book examines nineteenth century contexts of transnationalism, translation and literature. It demonstrates that the assumption that American literature has become transnational marks a blindness to the intrinsic transatlanticism of American literature.

Examines the ways and means of memory in the preservation of belief systems passed down from the earliest civilizations (both the Classical Greek and the Ancient Egyptian) as a challenge to the sterility of modernity. This work explores the use of Foucauldian theory that reclaims the origins of civilization's primal concerns.

This volume combines literary analysis and theoretical approaches to mobility, diasporic identities and the construction of space to explore the different ways in which the notion of return shapes contemporary ethnic writing such as fiction, ethnography, memoir, and film. Through a wide variety of ethnic experiences ranging from the Transatlantic, Asian American, Latino/a and Caribbean alongside their corresponding forms of displacement - political exile, war trauma, and economic migration - the essays in this collection connect the intimate experience of the returning subject to multiple locations, historical experiences, inter-subjective relations, and cultural interactions. They challenge the idea of the narrative of return as a journey back to the untouched roots and home that the ethnic subject left behind. Their diacritical approach combines, on the one hand, a sensitivity to the context and structural elements of modern diaspora; and on the other, an analysis of the individual psychological processes inherent to the experience of displacement and return such as nostalgia, memory and belonging. In the narratives of return analyzed in this volume, space and identity are never static or easily definable; rather, they are in-process and subject to change as they are always entangled in the historical and inter-subjective relations ensuing from displacement and mobility. This book will interest students and scholars who wish to further explore the role of American literature within current debates on globalization, migration, and ethnicity.

This volume combines literary analysis and theoretical approaches to mobility, diasporic identities and the construction of space to explore the different ways in which the notion of return shapes contemporary ethnic writing such as fiction, ethnography, memoir, and film. Through a wide variety of ethnic experiences ranging from the Transatlantic, Asian American, Latino/a and Caribbean alongside their corresponding forms of displacement - political exile, war trauma, and economic migration - the essays in this collection connect the intimate experience of the returning subject to multiple locations, historical experiences, inter-subjective relations, and cultural interactions.

This book studies the transnational nature of American cultural productions, examining how they serve as ways of perceiving American culture. Visiting literature, film, and music, it considers how manifestations of American culture have traveled and what has happened to the texts in the process, including how they have been commodified.

This book studies the transnational nature of American cultural productions, examining how they serve as ways of perceiving American culture. Visiting literature, film, and music, it considers how manifestations of American culture have traveled and what has happened to the texts in the process, including how they have been commodified.