Description
Book SynopsisArgues that what we call American literature is quite often a shorthand, a simplified name for an extended tangle of relations. This book contends that American literature is answerable not to the nation-state, but to the human species as a whole and that it looks dramatically different when removed from a national or English-language context.
Trade ReviewHonorable Mention for the 2007 Harry Levin Prize, American Comparative Literature Association Honorable Mention for the James Russell Lowell Prize "Offering new ways of reading, analyzing, and critiquing literature, Dimock's book will be invaluable to scholars of American literature, literary theory, comparative literature, and cultural studies."--Choice "Across Other Continents is a brave attempt at reading outside the box. Dimock's archive is idiosyncratic and her reading practice, as befits her thesis, rhizomatic. She roams broadly over fields of philosophy, science, ethics, anthropology, art history, philology, and religious history to create links between far-flung elements. Occasionally the tendrils that link disparate texts are gossamer thin, while others are startlingly resilient."--Michael Davidson, Novel "Wai Chee Dimock's provocative and original new book should serve as a methodological manifesto for the burgeoning field of transnational American literary studies."--Mark Pedretti, Emerson Society Papers "[S]tartlingly original and compelling studies of a diverse array of authors ... [A] groundbreaking book ... Dimock's sheer knack for linking abstract theoretical issues with concrete historical illustrations ... is on impressive display throughout."--Robert Kern, Modern Philology
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction Planet as Duration and Extension 1 Chapter One: Global Civil Society: Thoreau on Three Continents 7 Chapter Two: World Religions: Emerson, Hafiz, Christianity, Islam 23 Chapter Three: The Planetary Dead: Margaret Fuller, Ancient Egypt, Italian Revolution 52 Chapter Four: Genre as World System: Epic, Novel, Henry James 73 Chapter Five: Transnational Beauty: Aesthetics and Treason, Kant and Pound 107 Chapter Six: Nonstandard Time: Robert Lowell, Latin Translations, Vietnam War 123 Chapter Seven: African, Caribbean, American: Black English as Creole Tongue 142 Chapter Eight: Ecology across the Pacific: Coyote in Sanskrit, Monkey in Chinese 166 Notes 197 Index 237
