ABSTRACT
The purpose of this book is to read American literature in a manner that is attentive to America’s long and protracted interactions with European culture and, more specifi cally, with the European epic. My argument is that the fi ction of prominent, contemporary American writers appears in a different light when read against European generic traditions. Of course, by now it is common academic practice to refute and dismantle national canons, acknowledging the political motivations that underlie such formulations and aesthetic models. This book challenges such formal and ideological constructions by examining key American authors through alternative cultural and generic traditions. As the New Americanist critic Paul Giles has pointed out: ‘To read national literatures in a transnational way is thus to suggest the various forms of contingency that have entered into the formation of each naturalised inheritance.’1 My focus here is on the specifi cally American context, on the work of writers who are generally agreed to be the main fi gureheads in the post-war, American literary tradition. Thus, the analysis seeks to destabilise notions of a self-contained and indigenous American tradition, to displace the sense of a specifi cally American, national literature, in favour of a model based on the transatlantic interaction of literary cultures.
