Timelines of American literature

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Timelines of American literature

edited by Cody Marrs and Christopher Hager

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019

  • : pbk

Available at  / 6 libraries

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Includes index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

A collection of engaging essays that seeks to uniquely reperiodize American literature. It is all but inevitable for literary history to be divided into periods. "Early American," "antebellum," "modern," "post-1945"-such designations organize our knowledge of the past and shape the ways we discuss that past today. These periods tend to align with the watershed moments in American history, even as the field has shifted its perspective away from the nation-state. It is high time we rethink these defining periods of American literary history, as the drawing of literary timelines is a necessary-even illuminating-practice. In these short, spirited, and imaginative essays, 23 leading Americanists gamely fashion new, unorthodox literary periods-from 600 B.C.E. to the present, from the Age of Van Buren to the Age of Microeconomics. They bring to light literary and cultural histories that have been obscured by traditional timelines and raise provocative questions. What is our definition of "modernism" if we imagine it stretching from 1865 to 1965 instead of 1890 to 1945? How does the captivity narrative change when we consider it as a contemporary, not just a "colonial," genre? What does the course of American literature look like set against the backdrop of federal denials of Native sovereignty or housing policies that exacerbated segregation? Filled with challenges to scholars, inspirations for teachers (anchored by an appendix of syllabi), and entry points for students, Timelines of American Literature gathers some of the most exciting new work in the field to showcase the revelatory potential of fresh thinking about how we organize the literary past.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments 1. Introduction Cody Marrs and Christopher Hager Part 1. Prehistories and Transitions 2. Prologue. What's in a Date? Sandra Gustafson Prehistories 3. 1833-1932: American Literature's Other Scripts Erica Fretwell 4. 1922-1968: The Disenchanted Literature of Homeownership Adrienne Brown 5. 1830-1924: The Literatures of Sovereignty Phillip Round 6. 600 BCE-1830 CE: The Book of Mormon and the Lived Eschatology of Settler Colonialism Jared Hickman Transitions 7. 1629-1852: American Literature, Democracy, and the Patroons Jennifer Greiman 8. 1973: When It Changed Gerry Canavan 9. The Three Burials of Confederate Nationalism Coleman Hutchison 10. 1819-1857: Romantic Cycles from the Panic of 1819 to the Panic of 1857 Andrew Kopec 11. Reimagining 1820-1865 Robert S. Levine Part 2. Ages and the Long Present 12. Prologue. The Anthropocene, 1945/1783/1610/1492-???? (or, I Wish I Knew How to Quit You) Dana Luciano Ages 13. The Age of US Latinidad Jesse Aleman 14. The Age of Van Buren Justine S. Murison 15. The Ages of Appalachian Literature Rachel A. Wise 16. The Civil War in the Age of Civil Rights Michael LeMahieu 17. The Age of Warhol Bryan Waterman The Long Present 18. All of It Is Now: Slavery and the Post-black Moment in Contemporary African American Literature Yogita Goyal 19. Propaganda and the Movement of American Literary History Russ Castronovo 20. De-ciphering American Literature: Caroline Levander 21. Methodological Individualism and the Novel in the Age of Microeconomics, 1871 to the Present Annie McClanahan 22. 1980 to the Present: Formalism and the New Authoritarianism Rachel Greenwald Smith 23. American Captivity Narratives from the Colonial Era to the Present: A New Timeline Birgit Brander Rasmussen 24. Afterword. The Newer Newest Thing: Reperiodizing, Redux Susan Gillman Appendix. Sample Syllabi Contributors Index

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