American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler

American Literature in the World is an innovative anthology offering a new way to understand the global forces that have shaped the making of American literature. The wide-ranging selections are structured around five interconnected nodes: war; food; work, play, and travel; religions; and human and nonhuman interfaces. Through these five categories, Wai Chee Dimock and a team of emerging scholars reveal American literature to be a complex network, informed by crosscurrents both macro and micro, with local practices intensified by international concerns. Selections include poetry from Anne Bradstreet to Jorie Graham; the fiction of Herman Melville, Gertrude Stein, and William Faulkner; Benjamin Franklin’s parables; Frederick Douglass’s correspondence; Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders; Langston Hughes’s journalism; and excerpts from The Autobiography of Malcom X as well as Octavia Butler’s Dawn. Popular genres such as the crime novels of Raymond Chandler, the comics of Art Spiegelman, the science fiction of Philip K. Dick, and recipes from Alice B. Toklas are all featured. More recent authors include Junot Diaz, Leslie Marmon Silko, Jonathan Safran Foer, Edwidge Danticat, Gary Shteyngart, and Jhumpa Lahiri. These selections speak to readers at all levels and invite them to try out fresh groupings and remap American literature. A continually updated interactive component at www.amlitintheworld.yale.edu complements the anthology.

Wai Chee Dimock is William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University. Her most recent books are Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (2007) and Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (2006). Editor of PMLA, and a film critic for the Los Angeles Review of Books, her essays have also appeared in Critical Inquiry, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, and the New Yorker.

Jordan Brower is a graduate student at Yale University. Edgar Garcia is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. Kyle Hutzler works for McKinsey & Company. Nicholas Rinehart is a graduate student at Harvard University.