Description
Writing and America surveys the writing genres that have contributed to the American notions of America . Essays from scholars from both side of the Atlantic chart the range of responses to American nationhood from colonial times to the present and include dissenting responses from communities such as native American, black and feminist writers. Case studies from writers such as James Fenimore Cooper and William Carlos Williams provide a framework for discussions on topics such as colonial notions of America as the promised land, the discourses of nationhood in the republic, the sense of nationhood in American historiography, and the formation of the American Canon. Draws upon extracts from the American Bills of Rights and the Constitution as examples of different types of writing.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction. Writing Politics 2. The Role of the Constitution in the American Identity 3. Writing out of Communism. Writing and Gender 4. Women and Humour in America 5. The Western American Masculinity. Writing Race 6. The Native American in American Writng 7. The Slave Narrative in Afro-American Writing. Writing History 8. Discourse and Culture 9. 'James, Hawthorne and the Civil War'. Writing Place 10. Revisioning the American Landscape: from Utopia to Eco-critique 11. William Carlos Williams and the Reconstruction of America
