A Companion to the Literatures of Colonial America: Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture

The Companion is divided into four main sections: the opening section on issues and methods covers a wide range of approaches to defining and reading early American writing; the second section, entitled "New World Encounters", considers the interactions between cultural groups during the early centuries of exploration; the third section on identities looks at the development of regional spheres of influence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; while the final section considers major genres and writers of the period in a series of "Cross-Cultural Conversations".

The Companion is designed to be used alongside Castillo and Schweitzer's The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology (Blackwell Publishing, 2001).