Built for You & Your Students.
In reserching this book, we surveyed hundreds of American literature teachers about how you teach the course and what you want to see in an American literature book. Here is what you told us.

• There’s more than one way to teach this course. Many teach chronologically, but approaching American literature thematically and by genre are also popular methods.
• American literature teachers want to bring more modern texts into the classroom. Overwhelmingly, the teachers we surveyed reported that they wanted to teach a chapter on twenty-first-century American literature.
• It’s a struggle to find the time to teach contemporary literature. Most teachers we surveyed reported that they only reached the 1970s or 1980s by the end of the school year.

Flexible and innovative, American Literature & Rhetoric provides everything you need to teach your course. Combining reading and writing instruction to build essential skills in its four opening chapters and a unique anthology you need to keep students engaged in Chapters 5–10, this book makes it easy to teach chronologically, thematically, or by genre.

Opening chapters introduce key reading and writing skills for the American literature course.
Chapters 1–4 teach the reading and writing skills key to success in the American literature course. With equal attention to nonfiction and literature, these chapters provide scaffolded step-by-step instruction, activities, tips for revising, and model student essays. Each chapter culminates with an essay assignment that lets students apply what they have learned.

Anthology chapters revolutionize the American literature course.
The anthology chapters provide a unique combination of chronological and thematic approaches to American literature. They are organized to work for you regardless of how you approach teaching this course.

• Chapter 5: Redefining America (2001-present)

• Chapter 6: A Meeting of Old and New Worlds (Beginnings to 1830)
• Chapter 7: America in Conflict (1830-1865)
• Chapter 8: Reconstructing America (1865-1913)
• Chapter 9: America in the Modern World (1913-1945)
• Chapter 10: The Rise of a Superpower (1945-2000)

Chapter 5: Starting with the present to frame the past.
The first readings chapter of the book is Chapter 5: Redefining America (2001 to the Present). Beginning with contemporary texts immediately engages students with timeless themes and enduring issues — and also helps teachers solve the age-old problem of how to stop American literature from being stuck in the past.

A focus on the themes that define America.
All of the readings in the book connect to at least one of eight fundamental themes in American literature:

• American Ideals: Is America the Land of the Free?
• American Identity: What Does It Mean to Be American?
• Civil Rights in America: Liberty and Justice for All?
• The Immigrant Experience: What Is the American Dream?
• America at War: How Has Conflict Shaped America?
• Church and State: What Is the Role of Religion in American Life?
• Nature and the Environment: Is America the Land of Plenty?
• Prosperity and Inequality: Is America the Land of Opportunity?

Talkbacks: Highlighting voices and ideas that matter.
The diverse readings and innovative structure of American Literature & Rhetoric show students how the literature of the past connects to the present, inviting them to think critically about why those connections matter. Talkbacks threaded throughout the book pair classic and challenging pieces with modern and thought-provoking responses.

Giving students the tools to understand connections between American history and American literature.

• Illustrated chapter introductions provide essential context for the major events and social forces that define each time period, drawing connections to the specific pieces within the chapter.
• Key Context notes accompanying most texts help young readers navigate unfamiliar contexts that come with literature from other time periods and provide a sense of the bigger picture. This support is key for developing readers and English Language Learners.

Conversations reinforce evidence-based argument skills.
Because students’ ability to synthesize multiple sources is a primary concern of college composition courses — as well as a skill that must be demonstrated on the AP® Language Exam — the Conversation in each chapter provides source material and guiding questions to help students use the words and ideas of others to develop their own arguments. Each Conversation is centered on an enduring issue that continues to be a subject of debate today. In joining these Conversations, students investigate how the past continues to shape the present and develop positions on how to approach the future.

Visuals and outside texts engage students and enrich the study of American literature.

• Extending Beyond the Text features: Encouraging exploration and inspiring new ideas. This feature provides ways to both challenge well-prepared students and engage reluctant readers by giving students the opportunity to explore how the ideas of a piece connect with real-world issues and other texts.
• Emphasizing visual analysis: Images with a purpose. We believe that visual literacy is crucial to being able to understand and analyze our world, which is why American Literature & Rhetoric includes visual texts that accompany nearly all of the readings in the book. These images are carefully chosen — each one has a clear, authentic pedagogical purpose and a critical thinking question. We made it our goal to carefully select images that inform the reading of a print text, suggest new ideas, or provide additional context.

Comprehensive, in-depth questions provide targeted practice for key reading and writing skills.
The in-depth questions and writing prompts that follow each reading enable students to link reading with writing, guiding students from understanding what a text is about to analysis of how the content is presented and why — the rhetorical strategies.

• Understanding and Interpreting questions lay the foundation for analysis — these questions guide students to an understanding of the content and move them toward an interpretation.
• Analyzing Language, Style, and Structure questions ask students to look at craft — how the writer’s choices create meaning.
• Topics for Composing questions include extended essay and project ideas. These range from rhetorical analysis, literary analysis, and argument prompts to research and multimodal projects to creative writing and speaking and listening prompts for discussion.

Grammar instruction that meets students where they are.

• An appendix containing Grammar Workshops takes students from a basic understanding of a concept, to identification of errors, to application of the concept in context, and ultimately back into real writing to revise.
• End-of-chapter Grammar as Rhetoric and Style sections give concrete instruction on how grammar contributes to rhetorical purpose or stylistic effect. Using examples from the readings and culminating in scaffolded exercises, this feature focuses on one issue per chapter — such as coordination, parallel structures, or use of pronouns — and explores how what might seem a mechanical point can, in fact, be approached rhetorically.

End-of-chapter writing practice reinforces key skills.
Suggestions for Writing at the end of each chapter guide students toward written responses that connect multiple pieces within the chapter or extend to pieces beyond the chapter or even beyond the book. Expanding on the skills introduced in the opening chapters, these prompts give students the opportunity to practice writing in many modes, including but not limited to rhetorical analysis, argument, and synthesis.