Literature in Context: Reading American Novels is a collection of essays that introduces students to major disciplinary and methodological problems of studying American ‘literature’ today. It discusses changes of the field of American studies in a set of brief historical surveys and then focuses on recent strategies of reading literature in cultural context in more detail. Yet the novels analyzed form no general survey of American literary history. Rather, they provide examples of themes and issues that have been challenging scholars lately, and also offer an insight into the hermeneutics of literary response.       

The book introduces work by Americanists from New Criticism to Cultural Studies: from F. R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling through Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartmann and Heinz Ickstadt to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Sacvan Bercovitch, Vincent B. Leitch. It focuses on the consequences of disciplinary debates and changes of strategies of reading mainly in the area of Modernist and contemporary American fiction. It covers work by authors as diverse as Henry James, Edith Wharton, Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, Cristina Garcia, and even digresses to include the Irish Colm Tóibín. It points out thematic  connections and continuity in the reading of fiction today through concepts like race, class, gender, history, hybridity, culture. A resource for students and teachers, this book will also appeal to those interested in modern literature and culture.