ABSTRACT
American Literature and American Identity concludes with a brief afterword outlining some of the work that needs to be done before we can begin to reach any definite conclusions about American identity or its relation to American literature. Among other things, the present volume is not in any sense a survey of American literature. It is, rather, an attempt to isolate some significant patterns in the literary treatment of U.S. identity in roughly the first century of national independence. The various chapters of the book are designed to isolate these patterns by careful, detailed attention to a limited number of works by influential writers that is integrated with theoretical and empirical insights drawn from cognitive science, affective science, and social psychology. This method necessarily sacrifices breadth of coverage. It substitutes the hope of achieving increased depth in the understanding of the individual works studied, of American Identity more broadly, and of the cognitive and affective processes at work in identity formation in general.
