Contents:

1 Indians with Voices: Revisiting Savagism and Civilization
Betty Louise Bell (University of Michigan)

2 Wild Hope: Love, Money and Mythic Identity in the Novels of Louise Erdrich
William Blazek (Liverpool Hope University College)

3 Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee: Mythologies of Representation in Selected Writings on Boxing by Norman Mailer
Christopher Brookeman (University of Westminster)

4 The Secret Sharing: Myth and Memory in the Writing of Jayne Anne Phillips
Michael K. Glenday (The Open University)

5 The Individual’s Ghost: Towards a New Mythology of the Postmodern
Leslie Heywood (State University of New York, Binghamton)

6 ‘Cheap, On Sale, American Dream’: Contemporary Asian American Women Writers’ Responses to American Success Mythologies
Phillipa Kafka (Kean University)

7 ‘No Way Back Forever’: American Western Myth in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy
Peter Messent (University of Nottingham)

8 Native American Visions of Apocalypse: Prophecy and Protest in the Fiction of Leslie Marmon Silko and Gerald Vizenor
David Mogen (Colorado State University)

9 The Brave New World of Computing in Post-war American Science Fiction
David Seed (University of Liverpool)

10 Mythologies of ‘Ecstatic immersion’: America, The Poem and the Ethics of Lyric in Jorie Graham and Lisa Jarnot
Nick Selby (University of Glasgow)

11 Whose Myth is it Anyway? Coyote in the Poetry of Gary Snyder and Simon J. Ortiz
Mark Shackleton (University of Helsinki)

12 Aging, Anxious and Apocalyptic: Baseball’s Myths for the Millennium
Deeanne Westbrook (Portland State University)

13 Finding a Voice, Telling a Story: Constructing Communal Identity in Contemporary American Women’s Writing
Lois Parkinson Zamora (University of Houston)

In that few decades of its existence, the discipline of American studies has been reliably unreliable, its boundaries and assumptions forever shifting as it continuously repositions itself to better address the changing character of American life, literature, and culture. American Mythologies is a challenging new look at the current reinvention of American studies, a reinvention that has questioned the whole notion of what "American"- let alone "American studies"- means.

Essays in the collection range widely in considering these questions, from the effect of Muhammad Ali on Norman Mailer's writings about boxing to the interactions of myth and memory in the fictions of Jayne Anne Phillips to the conflicted portrayal of the American West in Cormac McCarthy's novels. Four essays in the collection focus on Native American authors, including Leslie Marmon Silko and Gerald Vizenor, while another considers Louise Erdrich's novels in the context of Ojibwa myth.

By bringing together perspectives on American studies from both Europe and America, American Mythologies provides a clear picture of the current state of the discipline while pointing out fruitful directions for its future