Race in American Literature and Culture

The book shows how American racial history and culture have shaped, and been shaped in turn by, American literature.

A comprehensive, multicultural study of the influential and complex presence of race in American literature by top scholars in African American, Latinx, Asian American, Native American, and white American studies. It explores how this history has been represented in literature, and how those representations have influenced American culture.Exploring the unsteady foundations of American literary history, Race in American Literature and Culture examines the hardening of racial fault lines throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth while considering aspects of the literary and interrelated traditions that emerged from this fractured cultural landscape. A multicultural study of the influential and complex presence of race in the American imagination, the book pushes debate in exciting new directions. Offering expert explorations of how the history of race has been represented and written about, it shows in what ways those representations and writings have influenced wider American culture. Distinguished scholars from African American, Latinx, Asian American, Native American, and white American studies foreground the conflicts in question across different traditions and different modes of interpretation, and are thus able comprehensively and creatively to address in the volume how and why race has been so central to American literature as a whole.