READINGS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE | THIS UNSETTLING PLACE

This reader introduces six American poets and short Story writers whose works span five centuries from the seventeenth to the twenty-first. The short stories and poems are supplemented with additional readings as well as critical and contextual essays. The critical introductions for the poetry and the prose sections consider that ways in which literary genre formalize even as perceptions of America as a nation coalesce into different narratives of self-definition. This Critical edition hopes to motivate questions about form and the construction of literary heritage.