From William Dickson's Rip Van Winkle films (1896) to Baz Luhrmann's big-budget production of The Great Gatsby (2013) and beyond, cinematic adaptations of American literature participate in a rich and fascinating history. Unlike previous studies of American literature and film, which emphasize particular authors like Edith Wharton and Nathaniel Hawthorne, particular texts like Moby-Dick, particular literary periods like the American Renaissance, or particular genres like the novel, this volume considers the multiple functions of filmed American literature as a cinematic genre in its own right-one that reflects the specific political and aesthetic priorities of different national and historical cinemas even as it plays a decisive role in defining American literature for a global audience.

How do works from film and literature—Sister Carrie, Native Son, Meet Me in St. Louis, Halloween, and A History of Violence, for example—imagine, reify, and reproduce Midwestern identity? And what are the repercussions of such regional narratives and images circulating in American culture? In The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism, Adam R. Ochonicky provides a critical overview of the evolution, contestation, and fragmentation of the Midwest's symbolic and often contradictory meanings. Using the frontier writings of Frederick Jackson Turner as a starting point, this book establishes a succession of Midwestern filmic and literary texts stretching from the late-19th century through the beginning of the 21st century and argues that the manifold properties of nostalgia have continually transformed popular understandings and ideological uses of the Midwest's place-identity. Ochonicky identifies three primary modes of nostalgia at play across a set of textual objects: the projection of nostalgia onto physical landscapes and into the cultural sphere (nostalgic spatiality); nostalgia as a cultural force that regulates behaviors, identities, and appearances (nostalgic violence); and the progressive potential of nostalgia to generate an acknowledgment and possible rectification of ways in which the flawed past negatively affects the present (nostalgic atonement). While developing these new conceptions of nostalgia, Ochonicky reveals how an under-examined area of regional study has received critical attention throughout the histories of American film and literature, as well as in related materials and discourses. From the closing of the Western frontier to the polarized political and cultural climate of the 21st century, this book demonstrates how film and literature have been and continue to be vital forums for illuminating the complex interplay of regionalism and nostalgia.

A History of American Crime Fiction places crime fiction within a context of aesthetic practices and experiments, intellectual concerns, and historical debates generally reserved for canonical literary history. Toward that end, the book is divided into sections that reflect the periods that commonly organize American literary history, with chapters highlighting crime fiction's reciprocal relationships with early American literature, romanticism, realism, modernism and postmodernism. It surveys everything from 17th-century execution sermons, the detective fiction of Harriet Spofford and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, to the films of David Lynch, HBO's The Sopranos, and the podcast Serial, while engaging a wide variety of critical methods. As a result, this book expands crime fiction's significance beyond the boundaries of popular genres and explores the symbiosis between crime fiction and canonical literature that sustains and energizes both.

In the years of and around the First World War, American poets, fiction writers, and dramatists came to the forefront of the international movement we call Modernism. At the same time a vast amount of non- and anti-Modernist culture was produced, mostly supporting, but also critical of, the US war effort. A History of American Literature and Culture of the First World War explores this fraught cultural moment, teasing out the multiple and intricate relationships between an insurgent Modernism, a still-powerful traditional culture, and a variety of cultural and social forces that interacted with and influenced them. Including genre studies, focused analyses of important wartime movements and groups, and broad historical assessments of the significance of the war as prosecuted by the United States on the world stage, this book presents original essays defining the state of scholarship on the American culture of the First World War.

America is a nation making itself up as it goes along—a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history. In more than two hundred original essays, A New Literary History of America brings together the nation’s many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what “Made in America” means. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoric—cultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape. The meeting of minds is extraordinary as T. J. Clark writes on Jackson Pollock, Paul Muldoon on Carl Sandburg, Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, Sarah Vowell on Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Walter Mosley on hard-boiled detective fiction, Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison, Gerald Early on Tarzan, Bharati Mukherjee on The Scarlet Letter, Gish Jen on Catcher in the Rye, and Ishmael Reed on Huckleberry Finn. From Anne Bradstreet and John Winthrop to Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, from Alexander Graham Bell and Stephen Foster to Alcoholics Anonymous, Life, Chuck Berry, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ronald Reagan, this is America singing, celebrating itself, and becoming something altogether different, plural, singular, new.

Demonstrates that the quest for immediacy, or experiences of direct connection and presence, has propelled the development of American literature and media culture.

A comprehensive, chronological overview of American literature in three scholarly and authoritative volumes A Companion to American Literature traces the history and development of American literature from its early origins in Native American oral tradition to 21st century digital literature. This comprehensive three-volume set brings together contributions from a diverse international team of accomplished young scholars and established figures in the field. Contributors explore a broad range of topics in historical, cultural, political, geographic, and technological contexts, engaging the work of both well-known and non-canonical writers of every period. Volume One is an inclusive and geographically expansive examination of early American literature, applying a range of cultural and historical approaches and theoretical models to a dramatically expanded canon of texts. Volume Two covers American literature between 1820 and 1914, focusing on the development of print culture and the literary marketplace, the emergence of various literary movements, and the impact of social and historical events on writers and writings of the period. Spanning the 20th and early 21st centuries, Volume Three studies traditional areas of American literature as well as the literature from previously marginalized groups and contemporary writers often overlooked by scholars. This inclusive and comprehensive study of American literature: Examines the influences of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and disability on American literature Discusses the role of technology in book production and circulation, the rise of literacy, and changing reading practices and literary forms Explores a wide range of writings in multiple genres, including novels, short stories, dramas, and a variety of poetic forms, as well as autobiographies, essays, lectures, diaries, journals, letters, sermons, histories, and graphic narratives. Provides a thematic index that groups chapters by contexts and illustrates their links across different traditional chronological boundaries A Companion to American Literature is a valuable resource for students coming to the subject for the first time or preparing for field examinations, instructors in American literature courses, and scholars with more specialized interests in specific authors, genres, movements, or periods.