Description
Book SynopsisRevealing the evolution of an independent, highly interdisciplinary program with distinctive subjects, methods, and goals that are much different than the traditional academic departments that nurtured it, this book entertains as it offers a twenty-first century account of how and why Americanists at home and abroad do what they do.
Trade Review“A rich and multifaceted assessment of the field. By interspersing chapters that focus in great detail on a single aspect of American Studies with broader chapters that help contextualize his arguments, Lauter has provided readers with a remarkably thorough, exciting, and satisfying work.”—Emory Elliott, University of California, Riverside
“Every page of this book gives evidence of an academic life spent in and for American Studies. Lauter covers a wide range of topics between the politics of cultural and literary texts and the politics in and beyond the classroom. In a sense, it offers the story of a lifetime—his own and that of his generation.”—Heinz Ickstadt, Freie Universität Berlin
“Paul Lauter, who has been a leading figure in the movement to expand the canon of American literature, is ideally placed to tell the story of American Studies. This book is news.”—Cathy N. Davidson, Former President, American Studies Association
Table of ContentsPart I: Practicing American Studies
1. Reconfiguring Academic Disciplines: The Emergence of American Studies
2. American Studies, American Politics, and the Reinvention of Class
3. Versions of Nashville, Visions of American Studies
4. Culture and Conformity in Wartime America: My Junior High School Songbook
5. Dinosaur Culture: From Mansfield Park to Jurassic Park
Part II: American Studies in a Racialized World
6. American Studies and Ethnic Studies at the Borderlands Crossroads
7. Of Chodors and Capital
8. Fiction as Politics: The Novels of Charles Chesnutt
Part III: Revisiting the Canon: The Question of Modernism
9. Reflecting On The Heath Anthology of American Literature
10. Melville Climbs the Canon
11. And Now, Ladies and Gentlemen, May I Present Miss Amy Lowell
12. Cold War Culture and the Construction of Modernism
