Romance with America?: Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies

'Romance with America?' is a collection of twenty-one essays by one of today's most important American Studies scholars. The selection assembled here pays tribute to the immense scope of Winfried Fluck's intellectual pursuits. It traces nearly four decades of continuous engagement with a set of key problems, among them the cultural functions of fiction and the imaginary, their manifestations in different periods of American literary and cultural history, the role of aesthetic experience in the construction of national and individual identities, as well as the state of American Studies and its competing narratives about America. Throughout these essays, several of them previously unpublished or not yet published in English, the author unfolds a comprehensive cultural theory that reaches well beyond the study of 'America.'