Race in American Literature and Culture

John Ernest

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781108487399
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108807791
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Exploring the unsteady foundations of American literary history, Race in American Literature and Culture examines the hardening of racial fault lines throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth while considering aspects of the literary and interrelated traditions that emerged from this fractured cultural landscape. A multicultural study of the influential and complex presence of race in the American imagination, the book pushes debate in exciting new directions. Offering expert explorations of how the history of race has been represented and written about, it shows in what ways those representations and writings have influenced wider American culture. Distinguished scholars from African American, Latinx, Asian American, Native American, and white American studies foreground the conflicts in question across different traditions and different modes of interpretation, and are thus able comprehensively and creatively to address in the volume how and why race has been so central to American literature as a whole.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series information
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Fractured Foundations
• Part II Racial Citizenship
• Part III Contending Forces
• Part IV Reconfigurations
• Part V Envisioning Race
• Part VI Case Studies
• Part VII Reflections and Prospects
• Index