ABSTRACT
The idea of America - the 'New World' as described by and subsequently named after a Florentine merchant, and colonized by wave on wave of free emigrants from Europe and Asia and enslaved Africans - is synonymous with the writing that has formed America. The central legal and political concepts that define America as a nation dedicated to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' are on paper in the form of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The British Romantics, for instance - notably Blake, Coleridge and Southey - revealed a view of America that influenced Americans in the attempts of the new Republic to differentiate itself from the Old World. It seeks as well to integrate the various component disciplines that make up American Studies, deliberately setting out to overcome conventional boundaries; historians write about literary texts, literary critics examine the construction of history.
