Rooting for a Better World: American Literary History Today.

After the canon and culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, some critics hazarded the possibility that American literature might fragment and disappear as a discipline. But 20 years later, as these book proposals suggest, we've abandoned totalizing national theories in favor of a more hemispheric study of how literatures variously treat sociological, political, ideological, historical, and environmental problems. We've entirely abandoned the nearly allwhite canon that characterized the study of American literature through the early 1980s; our literary archives are far more heterogeneous. While we've abandoned grand theories, there is much greater emphasis on the role of our own critical agency, and an impressive optimism about literature as an actual agent of power and its ability to participate in both indexing and making better worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]