These eleven essays confront the ongoing problem of defining American and modern--terms that often travel together as they defy periodization and other boundaries. Reading questions of nationalism and literature against the grain, the critics represented here address the epistemology and history of literary canonization, not simply the empirics of adding to or subtracting from the American canon.

As a whole, the volume comprises a range of poststructuralist and postmodern readings of American literature, as well as critiques of American aesthetics. Individually, each essay offers an in-depth and rigorous critique of a key text, or textual knot, in the ongoing and productively self-reflexive enterprise of American literary criticism.