Virtual Americas

Arguing that limited nationalist perspectives have circumscribed the critical scope of American Studies scholarship, Virtual Americas advocates a comparative criticism that illuminates the work of well-known literary figures by defamiliarizing it-placing it in unfamiliar contexts. Paul Giles looks at a number of canonical nineteenth- and twentieth-century American writers by focusing on their interactions with British culture. He demonstrates how American authors from Herman Melville to Thomas Pynchon have been compulsively drawn to negotiate with British culture, so that their nationalist agendas have emerged, paradoxically, through transatlantic dialogues. Virtual Americas ultimately suggests that conceptions of national identity in both the United States and Britain have emerged through engagement with-and, often, deliberate exclusion of-ideas and imagery emanating from across the Atlantic. Throughout Virtual Americas Giles focuses on specific examples of transatlantic cultural interactions such as Frederick Douglass's experiences and reputation in England; Herman Melville's satirizing fictions of U. S. and British nationalism; and Vladimir Nabokov's critique of European high culture and American popular culture in Lolita. He also reverses his perspective, looking at the representation of San Francisco in the work of British-born poet Thom Gunn and Sylvia Plath's poetic responses to England. Giles develops his theory about the need to defamiliarize the study of American literature by considering the cultural legacy of Surrealism as an alternative genealogy for American Studies and by examining the transatlantic dimensions of writers such as Henry James and Robert Frost in the context of Surrealism. Virtual Americas will be of interest to scholars of American and British literature, American studies, and cultural studies.

ISBN 0822329670   Pages 328 ISBN13 9780822329671 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Duke University Press   Weight (grammes) 562 Imprint Duke University Press   Published in North Carolina Format Paperback   Series title New Americanists Publication date 20 Dec 2002   Height (mm) 228 Library of Congress 2002003057   Width (mm) 154 DEWEY 813.0093584   Spine width (mm) 26 DEWEY edition DC21   Academic level Professional / Scholarly

		Preface
1		Virtual Subjects: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary		1
2		Narrative Reversals and Power Exchanges: Frederick Douglass and British Culture		22
3		"Bewildering Intertanglement": Melville's Engagement with British Tradition		47
4		"Changed and Queer": Henry James and the Surrealization of America		88
5		From Decadent Aesthetics to Political Fetishism: The "Oracle Effect" of Frost's Poetry		127
6		Virtual Eden: Lolita, Pornography, and the Perversions of American Studies		157
7		Crossing the Water: Gunn, Plath, and the Poetry of Passage		182
8		Virtual Englands: Pynchon's Transatlantic Heresies		225
9		Virtual Americas: Cyberpastoral Transnationalism, and the Ideology of Exchange		254
		Notes		287
		Index		329

"Virtual Americas is an important contribution to recent attempts to read American literary history from outside traditional parameters... [This] study is at its most impressive, I think, when it allows us to see both the material reality and the self-authorizing fictionality (what it calls virtuality) of American literature's nationalizing narratives."--Stuart Burrows, Americas "This book is important for its strong challenge to American Studies, as well as for its illuminating and provocative essays on individual authors... [A]n urgent and timely project."--Maria Stadter Fox, Intertexts "Taken of that basis, as a thought experiment in comparative method, [Giles'] book has much to offer, both in its unfamiliar readings of familiar texts and in its often lively assessment of the state of American studies today."--Bryan Wagner, American Literature "Virtual Americas explores, with immense insight and breathtaking speed, both familiar and relatively obscure texts..."--Hsuan L. Hsu, College Literature Reviewed in Choice. Listed in CHE, TLS Book Alert email. Reviewed in German in Anglistik. Mattessich, Lines of Flight "Mattessich has written a study to match the difficulty of his subject matter, enacting some of the same processes of self-reflection and self-erasure he identifies in Pynchon's work."--Virginia Quarterly Review "Those interested in, certainly, Pynchon, but also continental philosophy and contemporary American culture will profit from this book..."--Jerry Varsava, The International Fiction Review Listed in CHE, Critical Inquiry and boundary 2. Quoted in American Literary Scholarship. Negative review in Studies in the Novel and Pynchon Notes.

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