This book charts how the cartographies of American literature as an institutional category have varied radically across different times and places. Arguing that American literature was consolidated as a distinctively nationalist entity only in the wake of the U.S. Civil War, Paul Giles identifies this formation as extending until the beginning of the Reagan presidency in 1981. He contrasts this with the more amorphous boundaries of American culture in the eighteenth century, and with ways in which conditions of globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century have reconfigured the parameters of the subject. In light of these fluctuating conceptions of space, Giles suggests new ways of understanding the shifting territory of American literary history. ranging from Cotton Mather to David Foster Wallace, and from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Zora Neale Hurston. Giles considers why European medievalism and Native American prehistory were crucial to classic nineteenth-century authors such as Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville. He discusses how twentieth-century technological innovations, such as air travel, affected representations of the national domain in the texts of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. And he analyzes how regional projections of the South and the Pacific Northwest helped to shape the work of writers such as William Gilmore Simms, José Martí, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Gibson. Bringing together literary analysis, political history, and cultural geography, The Global Remapping of American Literature reorients the subject for the transnational era.

List of Illustrations viiAcknowledgments ixIntroduction: The Deterritorialization of American Literature 1Part One: Temporal LatitudesChapter 1: Augustan American Literature: An Aesthetics of Extravagance 29Restoration Legacies: Cook and Byrd 29The Plantation Epic: Magnalia Christi Americana 42New World Topographies: Wheatley, Dwight, Alsop 55Chapter 2: Medieval American Literature: Antebellum Narrativesand the "Map of the Infinite" 70Emerson, Longfellow, and the Longue Durée 70"Medieval" Mound Builders and the Archaeological Imagination 86Hawthorne, Melville, and the Question of Genealogy 97
Part Two: The Boundaries of the NationChapter 3: The Arcs of Modernism: Geography as Allegory 111Postbellum Cartographies: William Dean Howells 111Ethnic Palimpsests, National Standards 120"Description without Place": Stevens, Stein, and Modernist Geographies 125Chapter 4: Suburb, Network, Homeland: National Spaceand the Rhetoric of Broadcasting 141"Voice of America": Roth, Morrison, DeLillo 141Lost in Space: John Updike 154The MTV Generation: Wallace and Eggers 161
Part Three: Spatial LongitudesChapter 5: Hemispheric Parallax: South Americaand the American South 183Rotating Perspectives: Bartram, Simms, Martí 183Regionalism and Pseudo-geography: Hurston and Bishop 199Mississippi Vulgate: Faulkner and Barthelme 212Chapter 6: Metaregionalism: The Global Pacific Northwest 223Reversible Coordinates: The Epistemology of Space 223Orient and Orientation: Snyder, Le Guin, Brautigan 232Virtual Canadas: Gibson and Coupland 242Conclusion: American Literature and theQuestion of Circumference 255
Works Cited 269Index 305