Faces of Fiction: Essays on American Literature and Culture from the Jacksonian Period to Postmodernity

This collection of essays offers a coherent view of (North)American literary and cultural history from the times of James Fenimore Cooper to the present. Its focus is mainly on the novel and on poetry, but it also inquires into the relation between genres and discourses: between literature and painting, realism and the beginnings of American sociology, between fiction and the political rhetoric of expansion. Historically, it explores especially three periods of American literature and culture…