This collection of essays offers a coherent view of (North)American literary and cultural history from the times of James Fenimore Cooper to the present. Its focus is mainly on the novel and on poetry, but it also inquires into the relation between genres and discourses: between literature and painting, realism and the beginnings of American sociology, between fiction and the political rhetoric of expansion. Historically, it explores especially three periods of American literature and culture: the late-nineteenth century and the transition from Victorianism to the modern era, the forms and peculiarities of American literary modernism, and postmodern fiction (especially the work of Pynchon, Coover, and DeLillo). Within these areas of interest it emphasizes the rise and development of the American city novel as well as the different literary representations of the Canadian and U.S. American experience of the frontier and of the city. Thus the book gives evidence of the richness and diversity of American cultural expression, yet also of an academic lifetime's fascination with, and commitment to, American Studies.