Comparative North American Studies: Transnational Approaches to American and Canadian Literature and Culture
by Reingard M. Nischik
Contributing to the recent transnational turn in literary studies, Comparative North American Studies expands the borders of American Studies to examine the connection between American literature and other literatures and cultures, specifically Canadian. Through selected case studies and textual analyses of writers ranging from Tim O’Brien to Margaret Atwood, Nischik engages with a rich array of comparative approaches, including period-oriented, generic, thematic, imagological, and receptionist. Offering topics ranging from a comparative analysis of American and Canadian modernism to narratives of the Canada-US border, this book encourages the fields of American Studies and Canadian Studies to think more hemispherically, transnationally, and ultimately more expansively.
272 pages, Hardback
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
ISBN: 978 – 113 7564 221
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Praise for the book:
„From the pioneering editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative North American Studies comes this new comprehensive analysis of comparative North American literature and culture. This book continues to situate this emerging field in the wider context of global and hemispheric studies as well as in its specialist national-centered fields – and only Reingard M. Nischik could have written it. Canadianists and Americanists alike will gain important new perspectives from her insightful comparisons in and of multiple genres and art forms. She even shows us how Margaret Atwood is read (and reads) comparatively.“
– Linda Hutcheon, University Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, Canada
„Appearing at an exciting time when the criticism of national cultures is grappling with
transnational exchanges and mobilities, Reingard Nischik’s Comparative North American Studies offers an intensive examination of cross-border interdependencies at the sites of modernism, border narratives, nations‘ images abroad, and book reviewing – all while remaining cognizant of the continuing material effects of nation-states. And to top it off: a lively discussion with Margaret Atwood, whom Nischik calls ‚Canada’s most „North American“ writer.“‘
– Lorraine York, Senator William McMaster Chair in Canadian Literature and Culture, McMaster University, Canada
„Nischik uniquely brings together surveys and discussions of approaches to North American literature, arguing for an approach that she describes as a kind of new Comparative Studies, placing it in the context of such newer methods as hemispheric, continentalist, border, transnational, global, and cultural studies. Meticulously researched, the author’s coverage of histories of the production of short stories in the two countries is careful and useful, and her survey of her critical and, especially, her theoretical methods is nothing less than exhaustive. More, such compelling questions emerge as: Does the border between Canada and the US exist at the level of metaphor, or not? And, how significant is it?“
– Shannon Hengen, Professor Emerita of English, Laurentian University, Canada