American Literature in the World offers a new way to understand the global forces that affect the making of American literature. Through a wide selection of texts grouped into five interconnected categories, Wai Chee Dimock and a team of emerging scholars showcase U.S. authors in a striking new light: as participants in large-scale processes, energized by input from the rest of the world. American literature emerges as a charged prism, informed by broad disputes and complex crosscurrents, with local practices intensified by nonlocal concerns, demonstrating that the United States and the world are neither separate nor antithetical but intertwined and co-evolving.
Designed for course use, American Literature in the World is structured around war; food; work, play, and travel; religions; and human and nonhuman interface. Selections include poetry from Anne Bradstreet and Jorie Graham; the fiction of Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner; Benjamin Franklin’s parables, Thomas Jefferson’s letters, Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders; and excerpts from Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild and The Autobiography of Malcom X. 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 works speak to readers at all levels, encouraging them to try out new combinations and remap American literature using new media and technologies. Toward that end, the print anthology has an interactive online component at www.amlitintheworld.yale.edu.
