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With chapters written by leading scholars such as Steven Gould Axelrod, Cary Nelson, and Marjorie Perloff, this comprehensive Handbook explores the full range and diversity of poetry and criticism in 21st-century America.The Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry covers such topics as:· Major histories and genealogies of post-war poetry – from the language poets and the Black Arts Movement to New York school and the Beats· Poetry, identity and community – from African American, Chicana/o and Native American poetry to Queer verse and the poetics of disability· Key genres and forms – including digital, visual, documentary and children's poetry· Central critical themes – economics, publishing, popular culture, ecopoetics, translation and biographyThe book also includes an interview section in which major contemporary poets such as Rae Armantrout, and Claudia Rankine reflect on the craft and value of poetry today.

Conventional narratives describe the United States as a continental country bordered by Canada and Mexico. Yet, since the late twentieth century the United States has claimed more water space than land space, and more water space than perhaps any other country in the world. This watery version of the United States borders some twenty-one countries, particularly in the archipelagoes of the Pacific and the Caribbean. In Borderwaters Brian Russell Roberts dispels continental national mythologies to advance an alternative image of the United States as an archipelagic nation. Drawing on literature, visual art, and other expressive forms that range from novels by Mark Twain and Zora Neale Hurston to Indigenous testimonies against nuclear testing and Miguel Covarrubias's visual representations of Indonesia and the Caribbean, Roberts remaps both the fundamentals of US geography and the foundations of how we discuss US culture.

A literary scholar explains how eighteenth-century novels were manufactured, sold, bought, owned, collected, and read alongside Protestant religious texts. As the novel developed into a mature genre, it had to distinguish itself from these similar-looking books and become what we now call “literature.”Literary scholars have explained the rise of the Anglophone novel using a range of tools, from Ian Watt's theories to James Watt's inventions. Contrary to established narratives, When Novels Were Books reveals that the genre beloved of so many readers today was not born secular, national, middle-class, or female.For the first three centuries of their history, novels came into readers'hands primarily as printed sheets ordered into a codex bound along one edge between boards or paper wrappers. Consequently, they shared some formal features of other codices, such as almanacs and Protestant religious books produced by the same printers. Novels are often mistakenly credited for developing a formal feature (“character”) that was in fact incubated in religious books.The novel did not emerge all at once: it had to differentiate itself from the goods with which it was in competition. Though it was written for sequential reading, the early novel's main technology for dissemination was the codex, a platform designed for random access. This peculiar circumstance led to the genre's insistence on continuous, cover-to-cover reading even as the “media platform” it used encouraged readers to dip in and out at will and read discontinuously. Jordan Alexander Stein traces this tangled history, showing how the physical format of the book shaped the stories that were fit to print.

Drawing on theories of historiography, memory, and diaspora, as well as from existing genre studies, this book explores why contemporary writers are so fascinated with history. Pei-chen Liao considers how fiction contributes to the making and remaking of the transnational history of the U.S. by thinking beyond and before 9/11, investigating how the dynamics of memory, as well as the emergent present, influences readers'reception of historical fiction and alternate history fiction and their interpretation of the past. Set against the historical backdrop of WWII, the Vietnam War, and the War on Terror, the novels under discussion tell Jewish, Japanese, white American, African, Muslim, and Native Americans'stories of trauma and survival. As a means to transmit memories of past events, these novels demonstrate how multidirectional memory can be not only collective but connective, as exemplified by the echoes that post-9/11 readers hear between different histories of violence that thenovels chronicle, as well as between the past and the present.

The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies provides scholars and students of American Studies with theoretical and applied essays that help to define Transnational American Studies as a discipline and practice.In more than 30 essays, the volume offers a history of the concept of the'transnational'and takes readers from the Barbary frontier to Guam, from Mexico's border crossings to the intifada's contested zones. Together, the essays develop new ways for Americanists to read events, images, sound, literature, identity, film, politics, or performance transnationally through the work of diverse figures, such as Confucius, Edward Said, Pauline Hopkins, Poe, Faulkner, Michael Jackson, Onoto Watanna, and others. This timely volume also addresses presidential politics and interpictorial US history from Lincoln in Africa, to Obama and Mandela, to Trump. The essays, written by prominent global Americanists, as well as the emerging scholars shaping the field, seek to provide foundational resources as well as experimental and forward-leaning approaches to Transnational American Studies.

The field of transnational American studies is going through a paradigm shift from the transatlantic to the transpacific. This volume demonstrates a critical method of engaging the Asia Pacific: the chapters present alternative narratives that negotiate American dominance and exceptionalism by analyzing the experiences of Asians and Pacific Islanders from the vast region, including those from the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Hawaii, Guam, and other archipelagos. Contributors make use of materials from “oceanic archives,” retrieving what has seemingly been lost, forgotten, or downplayed inside and outside state-bound archives, state legal preoccupations, and state prioritized projects. The result is the recovery of indigenous epistemologies, which enables scholars to go beyond US-based sources and legitimates third-world knowledge production and dissemination. Surprising findings and unexpected perspectives abound in this work. Minnan traders from southern China are identified as the agents who connected the Indian Ocean with the Pacific, making the Manila Galleon trade in the sixteenth century the first completely global commercial enterprise. The Chamorro poetry of Guam gives a view of America from beyond its national borders and articulates the cultural pride of the Chamorro against US colonialism and imperialism. The continuing distortion of indigenous claims to the sovereignty of Hawaii is analyzed through a reading of the most widely circulated English translation of the creation myth, Kumulipo. There is also a critique of the Korean involvement in the American War in Vietnam, which was informed and shaped by Korean economy and politics in a global context. By investigating the transpacific as moments of military, cultural, and geopolitical contentions, this timely collection charts the reach and possibilities of the latest developments in the most dynamic form of transnational American studies.

Canadian Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror: Bridging the Solitudes exposes the limitations of the solitudes concept so often applied uncritically to the Canadian experience. This volume examines Canadian and Québécois literature of the fantastic across its genres—such as science fiction, fantasy, horror, indigenous futurism, and others—and considers how its interrogation of colonialism, nationalism, race, and gender works to bridge multiple solitudes. Utilizing a transnational lens, this volume reveals how the fantastic is ready-made for exploring, in non-literal terms, the complex and problematic nature of intercultural engagement.

Reading Asian American and Latino literature, Bilingual Brokers traces the shift in attitudes toward bilingualism in postwar America from the focus on cultural assimilation to that of resource management. Interweaving the social significance of language as human capital and the literary significance of English as the language of cultural capital, Jeehyun Lim examines the dual meaning of bilingualism as liability and asset in relation to anxieties surrounding “new” immigration and globalization.Using the work of Younghill Kang, Carlos Bulosan, Américo Paredes, Maxine Hong Kingston, Richard Rodriguez, Chang-rae Lee, Julia Alvarez, and Ha Jin as examples, Lim reveals how bilingual personhood illustrates a regime of flexible inclusion where an economic calculus of one's value crystallizes at the intersections of language and racial difference. By pointing to the nexus of race, capital, and language as the focal point of postwar negotiations of difference and inclusion, Bilingual Brokers probes the faultlines of postwar liberalism in conceptualizing and articulating who is and is not considered to be an American.

Departing from conventional narratives of the United States and the Americas as fundamentally continental spaces, the contributors to Archipelagic American Studies theorize America as constituted by and accountable to an assemblage of interconnected islands, archipelagoes, shorelines, continents, seas, and oceans. They trace these planet-spanning archipelagic connections in essays on topics ranging from Indigenous sovereignty to the work of Édouard Glissant, from Philippine call centers to US militarization in the Caribbean, and from the great Pacific garbage patch to enduring overlaps between US imperialism and a colonial Mexican archipelago. Shaking loose the straitjacket of continental exceptionalism that hinders and permeates Americanist scholarship, Archipelagic American Studies asserts a more relevant and dynamic approach for thinking about the geographic, cultural, and political claims of the United States within broader notions of America. ContributorsBirte Blascheck, J. Michael Dash, Paul Giles, Susan Gillman, Matthew Pratt Guterl, Hsinya Huang, Allan Punzalan Isaac, Joseph Keith, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Brandy Nālani McDougall, Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo, Craig Santos Perez, Brian Russell Roberts, John Carlos Rowe, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Ramón E. Soto-Crespo, Michelle Ann Stephens, Elaine Stratford, Etsuko Taketani, Alice Te Punga Somerville, Teresia Teaiwa, Lanny Thompson, Nicole A. Waligora-Davis

This book bridges comparative literature and American studies by using an intercultural and bilingual approach to Chinese American literature. King-Kok Cheung launches a new transnational exchange by examining both Chinese and Chinese American writers. Part 1 presents alternative forms of masculinity that transcend conventional associations of valor with aggression. It examines gender refashioning in light of the Chinese dyadic ideal of wen-wu (verbal arts and martial arts), while redefining both in the process. Part 2 highlights the writers'formal innovations by presenting alternative autobiography, theory, metafiction, and translation. In doing so, Cheung puts in relief the literary experiments of the writers, who interweave hybrid poetics with two-pronged geopolitical critiques. The writers examined provide a reflexive lens through which transpacific audiences are beckoned to view the “other” country and to look homeward without blinders.

Ethnic Modernism and the Making of US Multiculturalism in which ethnic literary modernists of the 1930s play a crucial role. Focusing on the remarkable careers of four ethnic fiction writers of the 1930s (Younghill Kang, D'Arcy McNickle, Zora Neale Hurston, and Américo Paredes) Sorensen presents a new view of the history of multicultural literature in the U.S. The first part of the book situates these authors within the modernist era to provide an alternative, multicultural vision of American modernism. The second part examines the complex reception histories of these authors'works, showing how they have been claimed or rejected as ancestors for contemporary multiethnic writing. Combining the approaches of the new modernist studies and ethnic studies, the book.

The central concern of the book is the impact of global terror networks and state counterterrorism on twentieth-century fiction. A unique contribution of this book is the comparative approach, as opposed to the single author focus of most of the edited collections on terrorism in literature.

The anticipatory logic of speculation and preemptive politics of risk are increasingly gaining significance in a globalizing neoliberal world. This study traces risk and speculation as aesthetic and political-economic strategies in factual and fictional discourses emerging at the North American Pacific Rim within a decade around 2000. Its exemplary close readings in particular focus on three fictional texts (Kathryn Bigelow's Hollywood film »Strange Days«, 1995, Karen T. Yamashita's novel »Tropic of Orange«, 1997, and Larissa Lai's novel »Salt Fish Girl«, 2002) whose intricate aesthetics pass perceptive critique on concurrent political-economic discourses and their subtle reconfiguration of race, class, and gender. The speculative near-future scenarios projected by these artifacts expose the rise of risk as a new rationality of governance. At the same time they illustrate neoliberal speculation as a new paradigm of subject formation at a hyper-capitalist, millennial Pacific Rim.

Presents a reference on Asian-American literature providing profiles of Asian-American writers and their works.

No concept has been more central to the emergence and evolution of identity studies than social justice. In historical and theoretical accounts, it crystallizes the progressive politics that have shaped the academic study of race, gender, and sexuality. Yet few scholars have deliberated directly on the political agency that notions of justice confer on critical practice. In Object Lessons, Robyn Wiegman contemplates this lack of attention, offering the first sustained inquiry into the political desire that galvanizes identity fields. In each chapter, she examines a key debate by considering the political aspirations that shape it. Addressing Women's Studies, she traces the ways that'gender'promises to overcome the exclusions of'women.'Turning to Ethnic Studies, she examines the deconstruction of'whiteness'as an antiracist methodology. As she explores American Studies, she links internationalization to the broader quest for noncomplicity in contemporary criticism. Her analysis of Queer Studies demonstrates how the commitment to antinormativity normalizes the field. In the penultimate chapter, Wiegman addresses intersectionality as the most coveted theoretical approach to political resolution in all of these fields.

In Reconstructing the Native South, Melanie Benson Taylor examines the diverse body of Native American literature in the contemporary U.S. South—literature written by the descendants of tribes who evaded Removal and have maintained ties with their southeastern homelands. In so doing Taylor advances a provocative, even counterintuitive claim: that the U.S. South and its Native American survivors have far more in common than mere geographical proximity. Both cultures have long been haunted by separate histories of loss and nostalgia, Taylor contends, and the moments when those experiences converge in explicit and startling ways have yet to be investigated by scholars. These convergences often bear the scars of protracted colonial antagonism, appropriation, and segregation, and they share preoccupations with land, sovereignty, tradition, dispossession, subjugation, purity, and violence.Taylor poses difficult questions in this work. In the aftermath of Removal and colonial devastation, what remains—for Native and non-Native southerners—to be recovered? Is it acceptable to identify an Indian “lost cause”? Is a deep sense of hybridity and intercultural affiliation the only coherent way forward, both for the New South and for its oldest inhabitants? And in these newly entangled, postcolonial environments, has global capitalism emerged as the new enemy for the twenty-first century? Reconstructing the Native South is a compellingly original work that contributes to conversations in Native American, southern, and transnational American studies.

This book examines the influence of genre on contemporary Asian American literary production. Drawing on cultural theories of representation, social theories of identity, and poststructuralist genre theory, this study shows how popular prose fictions have severely constrained the development of Asian American literary aesthetics.

In the United States, perhaps no minority group is considered as'model'or successful as the Asian American community. Rather than living in ominous'ghettoes,'Asian Americans are described as residing in positive-sounding'ethnic enclaves.'Writing the Ghetto helps clarify the hidden or unspoken class inequalities faced by Asian Americans, while insightfully analyzing the effect such notions have had on their literary voices. Yoonmee Chang examines the class structure of Chinatowns, Koreatowns, Little Tokyos, and Little Indias, arguing that ghettoization in these spaces is disguised. She maintains that Asian American literature both contributes to and challenges this masking through its marginalization by what she calls the'ethnographic imperative.'Chang discusses texts from the late nineteenth century to the present, including those of Sui Sin Far, Winnifred Eaton, Monica Sone, Fae Myenne Ng, Chang-rae Lee, S. Mitra Kalita, and Nam Le. These texts are situated in the contexts of the Chinese Exclusion Era, Japanese American internment during World War II, the globalization of Chinatown in the late twentieth century, the Vietnam War, the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and the contemporary emergence of the'ethnoburb.'