An essential and field-defining resource, this volume brings fresh approaches to major US novels, poetry, and performance literature of the twentieth century. With sections on 'structures', 'movements', 'attachments', and 'imaginaries', this handbook brings a new set of tools and perspectives to the rich and diverse traditions of American literary production. The editors have turned to leading as well as up-and-coming scholars in the field to foreground methodological concerns that assess the challenges of transnational perspectives, critical race and indigenous studies, disability and care studies, environmental criticism, affect studies, gender analysis, media and sound studies, and other cutting-edge approaches. The 20 original chapters include the discussion of working-class literature, border narratives, children's literature, novels of late-capitalism, nuclear poetry, fantasies of whiteness, and Native American, African American, Asian American, and Latinx creative texts.

Leslie Bow is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of English and Asian American Studies and Draheim Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of the award-winning, 'Partly Colored': Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South (2010); Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women's Literature (2001); and Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy (2022).
Russ Castronovo is the Tom Paine Professor of English at the University of of Wisconsin-Madison. He has held positions as Director of the American Studies Program, English Department Chair, and Director of the Center for the Humanities. Castronovo has published widely on American aesthetics, literature, and politics on topics such as democracy, propaganda, nationalism, citizenship, and security. His books include Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America (2014), Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era (2007), Necro-Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (2001), and Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom (1995).