As the introduction to this volume makes clear, the task of the current Cambridge History of American Literature differs significantly from that of its predecessors. Rather than seeking to identify, consolidate, and canonize an American literary tradition, this history arises from a cultural moment marked not by consensus but “dissensus.” Its task, therefore, is to “redraw the boundaries of the field” of American literary scholarship, opening up the canon to expansion and redefinition by acknowledging that literary history must be “a multivocal, multifaceted scholarly, critical, and pedagogic enterprise” driven by “the energies of heterogeneity.” The recognition that the American literary tradition must necessarily be conceived as heterogeneous has dictated one of the ways in which this Cambridge History differs from previous efforts: namely, its inclusion of this section’s comparative approach to emergent American literatures.

When the next multivolume literary history of the United States is written sometime during the next century, it will no doubt still need to include a section or set of sections on emergent literatures, because it seems unlikely that American culture will, in the intervening years, cease to marginalize nonwhites and nonheterosexuals. What we learn from Raymond Williams’s analysis of cultural dynamics is that human culture has always been the product of conflict and has always depended for its coherence on the identification of certain peoples, ideas, and practices as Other.