In three volumes of expert, innovative scholarship, Literary Cultures of Latin America offers a multidisciplinary reference on one of the most distinctive literary cultures in the world. In topically arranged articles written by a team of international scholars, Literary Cultures of Latin America explores the shifting problems that have arisen across national borders, geographic regions, time periods, linguistic systems, and cultural traditions in literary history. Bucking the tradition of focusing almost exclusively on the great canons of literature, this unique reference work casts its net wider, exploring pop culture, sermons, scientific essays, and more. While collaborators are careful to note that these volumes offer only a snapshot of the diverse body of Latin American literature, Literary Cultures of Latin America highlights unique cultural perspectives that have never before received academic attention. Comprised of signed articles each with complete bibliographies, this unique reference also takes into account relevant political, anthropological, economic, geographic, historical, demographic, and sociological research in order to understand the full context of each community's literature.

In three volumes of expert, innovative scholarship, Literary Cultures of Latin America offers a multidisciplinary reference on one of the most distinctive literary cultures in the world. In topically arranged articles written by a team of international scholars, Literary Cultures of Latin America explores the shifting problems that have arisen across national borders, geographic regions, time periods, linguistic systems, and cultural traditions in literary history. Bucking the tradition of focusing almost exclusively on the great canons of literature, this unique reference work casts its net wider, exploring pop culture, sermons, scientific essays, and more. While collaborators are careful to note that these volumes offer only a snapshot of the diverse body of Latin American literature, Literary Cultures of Latin America highlights unique cultural perspectives that have never before received academic attention. Comprised of signed articles each with complete bibliographies, this unique reference also takes into account relevant political, anthropological, economic, geographic, historical, demographic, and sociological research in order to understand the full context of each community's literature.

In three volumes of expert, innovative scholarship, Literary Cultures of Latin America offers a multidisciplinary reference on one of the most distinctive literary cultures in the world. In topically arranged articles written by a team of international scholars, Literary Cultures of Latin America explores the shifting problems that have arisen across national borders, geographic regions, time periods, linguistic systems, and cultural traditions in literary history. Bucking the tradition of focusing almost exclusively on the great canons of literature, this unique reference work casts its net wider, exploring pop culture, sermons, scientific essays, and more. While collaborators are careful to note that these volumes offer only a snapshot of the diverse body of Latin American literature, Literary Cultures of Latin America highlights unique cultural perspectives that have never before received academic attention. Comprised of signed articles each with complete bibliographies, this unique reference also takes into account relevant political, anthropological, economic, geographic, historical, demographic, and sociological research in order to understand the full context of each community's literature.

John Carlos Rowe, considered one of the most eminent and progressive critics of American literature, has in recent years become instrumental in shaping the path of American studies. His latest book examines literary responses to U.S. imperialism from the late eighteenth century to the 1940s. Interpreting texts by Charles Brockden Brown, Poe, Melville, John Rollin Ridge, Twain, Henry Adams, Stephen Crane, W. E. B Du Bois, John Neihardt, Nick Black Elk, and Zora Neale Hurston, Rowe argues that U.S. literature has a long tradition of responding critically or contributing to our imperialist ventures. Following in the critical footsteps of Richard Slotkin and Edward Said, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism is particularly innovative in taking account of the public and cultural response to imperialism. In this sense it could not be more relevant to what is happening in the scholarship, and should be vital reading for scholars and students of American literature and culture.

"A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula" is the second comparative history of a new subseries with a regional focus, published by the Coordinating Committee of the International Comparative Literature Association. As its predecessor for East-Central Europe, this two-volume history distances itself from traditional histories built around periods and movements, and explores, from a comparative viewpoint, a space considered to be a powerful symbol of inter-literary relations. Both the geographical pertinence and its symbolic condition are obviously discussed, when not even contested.Written by an international team of researchers who are specialists in the field, this history is the first attempt at applying a comparative approach to the plurilingual and multicultural literatures in the Iberian Peninsula. The aim of comprehensiveness is abandoned in favor of a diverse and extensive array of key issues for a comparative agenda."A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula" undermines the primacy claimed for national and linguistic boundaries, and provides a geo-cultural account of literary inter-systems which cannot otherwise be explained.

The genesis of Comparative Cultural Studies and Latin America stems from the contributors' conviction that, given its vitality and excellence, Latin American literature deserves a more prominent place in comparative literature publications, curricula, and disciplinary discussions. The editors introduce the volume by first arguing that there still exists, in some quarters, a lingering bias against literature written in Spanish and Portuguese. Secondly, the authors assert that by embracing Latin American literature and culture more enthusiastically, comparative literature would find itself reinvigorated, placed into productive discourse with a host of issues, languages, literatures, and cultures that have too long been paid scant academic attention. Following an introduction by the editors, the volume contains papers by Gene H. Bell-Villada on the question of canon, by Gordon Brotherston and Lúcia de Sá on the First Peoples of the Americas and their literature, by Elizabeth Coonrod Martínez on the Latin American novel of the 1920s, by Román de la Campa on Latin American Studies, by Earl E. Fitz on Spanish American and Brazilian literature, by Roberto González Echevarría on Latin American and comparative literature, by Sophia A. McClennen on comparative literature and Latin American Studies, by Alberto Moreiras on Borges, by Julio Ortega on the critical debate about Latin American cultural studies, by Christina Marie Tourino on Cuban Americas in New York City, by Mario J. Valdés on the comparative history of literary cultures in Latin America, and by Lois Parkinson Zamora on comparative literature and globalization. The volume also contains a bibliography of scholarship in comparative Latin American culture and literature and biographical abstracts of the contributors to the volume.

Has thinking, working and teaching in terms of national literatures become obsolete in today’s globalized world of hyphenated languages, literatures and cultures? Since the rise of modern European national philologies coincided with the emergence of modern European nation-states, does the dissolution of the latter in the European supranational unity imply the suspension of the former? Or we must, on the contrary, consider the fact that today’s Europe is not only postnational but, in its re-nationalized East-Central-European part, post-multinational as well, i.e., emerging out of the breakdown of the postimperial state formations such as the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia?