Introduzione

[Machine translation] The volume offers an introduction to the literature of the United States, offering an agile and versatile tool for orienting the student and the reader in the immensely vast horizon of American letters from the mid-nineteenth century to the contemporary era. The essays offer perspectives and keys to interpretation on periods, traditions and genres, ranging from nineteenth-century masterpieces to slave narratives, from modernist poetics to the aesthetics of hard boiled, noir and thriller. Studies on modernism, postmodernism and contemporaneity offer an overall theoretical arrangement of the most relevant trends in fiction, while the new reading of the theatrical scene reveals its social aspects, reconstructing its audiences, performers, “separate” theaters and experimentations.