These diverse essays recast the place of aesthetics in production & consumption of American literature. Contributors showcase the interpretive possibilities available to those who bring politics, culture, ideology, & conceptions of identity into their critiques, combining close readings of individual works & authors with theoretical discussions.

We encounter in our lives things and situations that elicit from us special forms of attention. They affect and inform us in various ways, drawing us in and holding us in their grasp or turning us away. Works of art of all sorts, and nature in its myriad manifestations, exemplify these luring and repelling qualities and potencies. Dimensions of Aesthetic Encounters explores central perceptual, interpretative, and semiotic dimensions of these encounters, combining a wide range of examples and intellectual resources from pragmatist, hermeneutical, and semiotic frameworks. Practicing a kind of "method of rotation" Robert E. Innis breaks down barriers in aesthetic theory and shows their complementary powers. Recurring themes link each chapter, throwing a powerful light on aesthetic encounters by foregrounding such pivotal notions as play, fundedness and the role of memory, the defining quality of an artwork, energies of objects, potencies, rhythm, form, presentational abstraction, medium, symbolization, intuition, role of the body, and the non-argumentative nature of art.

Developing a concept briefly introduced in Counterrevolution and Revolt, Marcuse here addresses the shortcomings of Marxist aesthetic theory and explores a dialectical aesthetic in which art functions as the conscience of society. Marcuse argues that art is the only form or expression that can take up where religion and philosophy fail and contends that aesthetics offers the last refuge for two-dimensional criticism in a one-dimensional society.

Practices of Surprise in American Literature After Emerson locates a paradoxical question - how does one prepare to be surprised? - at the heart of several major modernist texts. Arguing that this paradox of perception gives rise to an American literary methodology, this book dramatically reframes how practices of reading and writing evolved among modernist authors after Emerson. Whereas Walter Benjamin defines modernity as a 'series of shocks' inflicted from without, Emerson offers a countervailing optic that regards life as a 'series of surprises' unfolding from within. While Benjaminian shock elicits intimidation and defensiveness, Emersonian surprise fosters states of responsiveness and spontaneity whereby unexpected encounters become generative rather than enervating. As a study of how such states of responsiveness were cultivated by a post-Emerson tradition of writers and thinkers, this project displaces longstanding models of modernist perception defined by shock's passive duress, and proposes alternate models of reception that proceed from the active practice of surprise.

Ambivalent Transnational Belonging in American Literature discusses the extent to which transnational concepts of identity and community are cast within nationalist frameworks. It analyzes how the different narrative perspectives in texts by Olaudah Equiano, Catharina Maria Sedgwick, Henry James, Jamaica Kincaid, and Mohsin Hamid shape protagonists’ complex transnational subjectivities, which exist between or outside national frameworks but are nevertheless interpellated through the nation-state and through particular myths about liberal, sentimental, or cosmopolitan subjects. The notion of ambivalent transnational belonging yields insights into the affective appeal of the transnational as a category of analysis, as an aesthetic experience, and as an idea of belonging. This means bringing the transnational into conversation with the aesthetic and the affective so we may fully address the new conceptual challenges faced by literary studies due to the transnational turn in American studies.

A scholarly review of American world literature from early times to the postmodernist era American World Literature: An Introduction explores how the subject of American Literature has evolved from a national into a global phenomenon. As the author, Paul Giles – a noted expert on the topic – explains, today American Literature is understood as engaging with the wider world rather than merely with local or national circumstances. The book offers an examination of these changing conceptions of representation in both a critical and an historical context. The author examines how the perception of American culture has changed significantly over time and how this has been an object of widespread social and political debate. From examples of early American literature to postmodernism, the book charts ways in which the academic subject areas of American Literature and World Literature have converged – and diverged – over the past generations. Written for students of American literature at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels and in all areas of historical specialization, American World Literature offers an authoritative guide to global phenomena of American World literature and how this subject has undergone crucial changes in perception over the past thirty years.

Although cross-cultural encounter is often considered an economic or political matter, beauty, taste, and artistry were central to cultural exchange and political negotiation in early and nineteenth-century America. Part of a new wave of scholarship in early American studies that contextualizes American writing in Indigenous space, Literary Indians highlights the significance of Indigenous aesthetic practices to American literary production. Countering the prevailing notion of the "literary Indian" as a construct of the white American literary imagination, Angela Calcaterra reveals how Native people's pre-existing and evolving aesthetic practices influenced Anglo-American writing in precise ways. Indigenous aesthetics helped to establish borders and foster alliances that pushed against Anglo-American settlement practices and contributed to the discursive, divided, unfinished aspects of American letters. Focusing on tribal histories and Indigenous artistry, Calcaterra locates surprising connections and important distinctions between Native and Anglo-American literary aesthetics in a new history of early American encounter, identity, literature, and culture.