American Literature as World Literature

Jeffrey R. Di Leo is Dean of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Houston-Victoria, USA. His books include Higher Education under Late Capitalism: Identity, Conduct, and the Neoliberal Condition (2017), Dead Theory: Derrida, Death, and the Afterlife of Theory (Bloomsbury, 2016), Corporate Humanities in Higher Education: Moving Beyond the Neoliberal Academy (2014), and Turning the Page: Book Culture in the Digital Age (2013).

A dynamic anthology with thirteen essays that push beyond traditional comparative literature geographies and genres to ask how American literature is uniquely worldly… An important contribution to a burgeoning field of global American studies, American Literature as World Literature deserves to be widely read.

• AcknowledgmentsAmerican Literature as World Literature: An IntroductionJeffrey R. Di Leo (University of Houston-Victoria, USA)Part 1: World, Worldings, Worldliness1. American Literature and Its Shadow Worlds: Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Specters of WorldlinessPaul Giles (University of Sydney, Australia)2. Worldings of American Literature Off the Cultural RadarLawrence Buell (Harvard University, USA)3. Who Needs American Literature? From Emerson to Marcus and SollorsJeffrey R. Di Leo (University of Houston-Victoria, USA)Part 2: Literature, Geopolitics, Globalization4. Worlds of AmericanaPeter Hitchcock (City University of New York, USA)5. Political Serials: Tanner ’88 to House of CardsEmily Apter (New York University, USA)6. Weltliterature? Mapping American Literature after Territorialism: Manifesto for a 21st-Century Critical AgendaChristian Moraru (University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA)7. Amitav Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy in American World LiteratureJonathan Arac (University of Pittsburgh, USA)Part 3: Experience, Poetics, New Worlds8. Whitman’s Polyvocal Poetic Revolution: Equality and Empire in New World LiteratureGabriel Rockhill (Villanova University, USA)9. Experience to Experiment, SIgns to Signals: Towards Flusser’s New WorldAaron Jaffe (Florida State University, USA)10. Un-Making American Literature: Mind-Making Fictions of the LiteraryAlan Singer (Temple University, USA)Part 4: History and the American Novel11. Last American Stories and Their Adventurous SequelsRobert Caserio (Penn State University, USA)12. Transhuman Poetics and American World Literature: James Baldwin’s Demon of History in Just Above My HeadDaniel O’Hara (Temple University, USA)13. The Pathos of History: Trauma in Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an AmericanJean-Michel Rabaté (University of Pennsylvania, USA) Notes on ContributorsIndex