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This book charts how the cartographies of American literature as an institutional category have varied radically across different times and places. Arguing that American literature was consolidated as a distinctively nationalist entity only in the wake of the U.S. Civil War, Paul Giles identifies this formation as extending until the beginning of the Reagan presidency in 1981. He contrasts this with the more amorphous boundaries of American culture in the eighteenth century, and with ways in which conditions of globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century have reconfigured the parameters of the subject. In light of these fluctuating conceptions of space, Giles suggests new ways of understanding the shifting territory of American literary history. ranging from Cotton Mather to David Foster Wallace, and from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Zora Neale Hurston. Giles considers why European medievalism and Native American prehistory were crucial to classic nineteenth-century authors such as Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville. He discusses how twentieth-century technological innovations, such as air travel, affected representations of the national domain in the texts of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. And he analyzes how regional projections of the South and the Pacific Northwest helped to shape the work of writers such as William Gilmore Simms, José Martí, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Gibson. Bringing together literary analysis, political history, and cultural geography,The Global Remapping of American Literaturereorients the subject for the transnational era.

(\"What Kinds of Times are These,\" Adrienne Rich) There are ways in which the relationship between ecopolitics and migration will come to be further understood by the scholars and policy makers in the coming years, as the world begins to grapple with the extent of climate refugees and mass migration caused by environmental disasters in the era of climate change. The audience and presenter, in this situation, are not fazed by the political implications of Islam, as throughout the Levantine Middle-East it is widely assumed that the links between religious guerilla militias and actual religious spirituality are conveniently nominal. If my country is cold I will be its cover. Because it is the crown on my head and my lord. [...]while the focus of my interviews was on the creation of domestic situations within their new urban built environments (flimsy though these buildings are), the repeated tendency of the interviewees to engage in an imaginative and figurative drifting to explore and explain an outside nesting experience suggested that the description of the space surrounding their tent or caravan was as central to their nesting imaginations as the creation of a space within their inhabited domestic spaces. When asked about their nesting practices within their allocated tents or caravans, even the most resourceful refugees I spoke to were either embarrassed or apologetic, often using the space of the question to recall the technology and comforts of their lost homes.

The aim of the paper is to discover to what extent and in which respects James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Pioneers (1823) can be regarded as the forerunner of American environmental literature, preceding thus Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), which is usually considered as the foundational text. As a classification frame, the paper employs Lawrence Buell’s set of interrelated imaginative structures of ecocentric literary vision. The results of the examination indicate that out of the five imaginative structures of environmental literature, Relinquishment, Nature’s Personhood, Nature’s Face and Mind’s Eye: Seasons, Sense of Place, and Environmental Apocalypticism, all are at work and display a distinctive ecocentric orientation in the novel but with a different degree of intensity and frequency.

What we call American literature is quite often a shorthand, a simplified name for an extended tangle of relations.\" This is the argument of Through Other Continents, Wai Chee Dimock’s sustained effort to read American literature as a subset of world literature. Inspired by an unorthodox archive--ranging from epic traditions in Akkadian and Sanskrit to folk art, paintings by Veronese and Tiepolo, and the music of the Grateful Dead--Dimock constructs a long history of the world, a history she calls \"deep time.\" The civilizations of Mesopotamia, India, Egypt, China, and West Africa, as well as Europe, leave their mark on American literature, which looks dramatically different when it is removed from a strictly national or English-language context. Key authors such as Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, Gary Snyder, Leslie Silko, Gloria Naylor, and Gerald Vizenor are transformed in this light. Emerson emerges as a translator of Islamic culture; Henry James’s novels become long-distance kin to Gilgamesh; and Black English loses its ungrammaticalness when reclassified as a creole tongue, meshing the input from Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

American literature is typically seen as something that inspired its own conception and that sprang into being as a cultural offshoot of America's desire for national identity. But what of the vast precedent established by English literature, which was a major American import between 1750 and 1850? In The Importance of Feeling English, Leonard Tennenhouse revisits the landscape of early American literature and radically revises its features. Using the concept of transatlantic circulation, he shows how some of the first American authors--from poets such as Timothy Dwight and Philip Freneau to novelists like William Hill Brown and Charles Brockden Brown--applied their newfound perspective to pre-existing British literary models. These American \"re-writings\" would in turn inspire native British authors such as Jane Austen and Horace Walpole to reconsider their own ideas of subject, household, and nation. The enduring nature of these literary exchanges dramatically recasts early American literature as a literature of diaspora, Tennenhouse argues--and what made the settlers' writings distinctly and indelibly American was precisely their insistence on reproducing Englishness, on making English identity portable and adaptable. Written in an incisive and illuminating style, The Importance of Feeling English reveals the complex roots of American literature, and shows how its transatlantic movement aided and abetted the modernization of Anglophone culture at large.

Has anyone ever worked harder and longer at being immature than Philip Roth? The novelist himself pointed out the paradox, saying that after establishing a reputation for maturity with two earnest novels, he \"worked hard and long and diligently\" to be frivolous--an effort that resulted in the notoriously immature Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). Three-and-a-half decades and more than twenty books later, Roth is still at his serious \"pursuit of the unserious.\" But his art of immaturity has itself matured, developing surprising links with two traditions of immaturity--an American one that includes Emerson, Melville, and Henry James, and a late twentieth-century Eastern European one that developed in reaction to totalitarianism. In Philip Roth’s Rude Truth--one of the first major studies of Roth’s career as a whole--Ross Posnock examines Roth’s \"mature immaturity\" in all its depth and richness.

[...]it's scarred by tire tracks and logging roads. In their book, Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America, M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer suggest that another rhetorical problem is that \"a division has evolved in American environmental politics between, on the one hand, experts, who have institutionalized access to authoritative information and influence, and on the other hand, the general public, whose sources of information and whose power to influence policy remains uncertain\" (163). The anchor point of connecting this view to fly fishing is that a habitual body of experience engaging in the natural world should develop into behaviours that are virtuous in terms of the health of that world. [...]on a social/communal level, the fly fisher, in acting accordingly with the health of the ecosystem, enhances their personal character as well as their right to weigh in on environmental subjects. The fly fisher is introduced to the sport and finds some connection that spurs them to continue; nature presents its facts in the form of knowledge on hydrology, entomology, and other complexities that lead the fly fisher to learn about the web of connections in an aquatic ecosystem; experience and observation begins to open up the fly fisher to the message that environments are qualitatively important and witnessing the effects of human activity upon the biotic community gives the fly fisher the reasons to act in the environment's interest (which is so often unknowingly in human interest); and, ultimately, the conclusion rests in the hands of the potential environmental advocate who is either converted as a steward of the environment or is held back or persuaded by other interests.

Here feel we not the penalty of Adam, The season's difference, as the icy fang And churlish chiding of the winter's wind, Which, when it bites and blows upon my body Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say \"This is no flattery\"; these are counsellors That feelingly persuade me what I am. Later, in Orlando's rescue of Oliver from the snake and the tiger, the Forest of Arden turns out to be not the biosphere it first appeared to be - wild, inhospitable to humankind - but something closer to the national park that Duke Senior has imagined * an actual place, the Forest of Arden in Warwickshire, a landscape in which human beings like Corin must eke out a living by hunting or raising sheep * (at the opposite extreme) the locus amoenus of pastoral idylls, a decorative landscape inhabited by the likes of Silvius and Phoebe Each of these five places relates the human to the beyond-human in different ways; each offers a different sort of oikos, a different set dwelling arrangements, a different means of articulating the environment in language.

Innovation in cultural practice is both an act and an event where by the other is brought into and comes into being. I call the private aspect of this process creation and the public aspect, by which innovation gives rise to further innovation, invention. A related phenomenon is the responsible encounter with the human other; in both, the subject's modes of understanding undergo change as the subject registers and affirms the singularity of the other. A further domain to which this account applies is reading, another act-event in which a responsible response entails an innovative affirmation of innovation. Responding to the literary work involves performing its verbal forms. The responsibility invoked in all these instances is responsibility for rather than to, since the other is brought into existence (and transformed from other to same) by the subject's response. The ethical obligation implied here is, as Levinas argues, prior to any philosophical account we could give of it.

This article will analyze Hemingway’s African encounters by emphasizing the literary strategies he used to authenticate cultural curiosity. This analysis will reveal a hidden frame of false promises played out between urban memories and constructions of an African wilderness. Methodologically, I will combine a Rortian reading of Hemingway’s African encounters with recent theories of ecocriticism. By tapping into the rich resources of aesthetics, ethics, and cultural theory my reading will put to test whether, as Lawrence Buell suggests, the power of imaginative literature can foster a climate of “transformed environmental values, perception and will” (Buell vi)