Reflections on Social Engineering and Settler-American Literature

The publication and dissemination of literature (and, tangentially, the study of literature) within boundaries of a national identity invariably focuses public attention on the opinions of a small number of authors, publishers, reviewers, and critics. These sociocultural projections of a uniform (and for that reason illusory) United States national identity, national literature, and associated parallels of cultural collectivity—for a populace of over 300 million—is a circumstance that deserve..