American studies and American literature: can it be useful?
American studies and American literature: can it be useful?

Summary/Abstract: It is a truism that imaginative literature throughout its history, at least since the time of antiquity, has always seemed in a permanent crisis, constantly disparaged by various principals and agents, for political, moral, educational and other reasons, from Plato to Stalin, to Hitler and to Khomeini. Its inevitable demise was predicted a myriad times. As a consequence, many writers, including Philip Sidney, Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as John Gardner in America more recently, tried to defend and protect their métier as well as their literary products by writing apologies and justifications for their trade. But works of imaginative literature keep surviving and appearing in spite of attacks and dire predictions, and, it would seem, not really due to defenders and protectors of the genre.

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