The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and Empire

This volume is for students, teachers, and general readers who want to understand the complex relationship between American literature and empire. The volume traverses five centuries of literary and imperial history to offer an interdisciplinary, hemispheric, and global account of American literature.

The story of American literature and empire goes beyond the broad historical periodization of empire to reimagine that history. The central terms American and literature have always been tied up in US empire as well as other empires in the Americas. The word 'America,' itself the product of inter-imperial intellectual rivalry, claims the name of an entire hemisphere for one country therein. To understand the full history of American literature and empire is to recognize its deep, strategically obscure, and often disavowed imperial contexts that in turn require differentially transatlantic, hemispheric, and global frameworks of analysis. This collection thus takes a sceptical stance toward its own geographical referent. Literature has a long and continuing imperial history as empire's proxy. These essays cover canonical authors such as Cooper, Melville, Whitman, and Baldwin as well as lesser-known writers, including emergent artists focused on world-making with a reparative, speculative attention to the future.