American Studies: Undergraduate course

University of Leicester. Source ©

Background reading: introductory

  • Howard Temperley and Christopher Bigsby (eds.), A New Introduction to American Studies (Pearson Education Limited)
  • Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA (Penguin)
  • Mick Gidley (ed.), Modern American Culture (Longman)
  • John Belton, American Cinema/American Culture (McGraw-Hill)
  • Eric Foner, Give me Liberty: An American History (Norton)

Background reading: advanced

  • Malcolm Bradbury, Modern American Fiction (Oxford)
  • Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, Keywords for American Cultural Studies (NYU Press)
  • Neil Campbell and Alastair Kean, American Cultural Studies (Routledge)
  • John Hill and Pamela Gibson (eds.), American Cinema and Hollywood (Oxford)
  • William Chafe, The Unfinished Journey (Oxford)
  • Douglas Tallack, Twentieth-Century America (Longman)

Literature

  • F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Penguin)
  • Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (Penguin)
  • Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Penguin)
  • Don Delillo, Libra (Penguin)
  • Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (Picador)
  • Contemporary American Poetry (Penguin)

History

  • George Tindall and David Shi, America: A Narrative History (Norton)
  • Paul Boyer et al., The Enduring Vision (Houghton Mifflin)
  • Sara Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (Free Press)
  • Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (HarperCollins)
  • Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (Longman)
  • Walter LaFeber, The American Age: US Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad, 1750 to the present (Norton)

Politics

  • David McKay, American Politics and Society (Blackwell)
  • Robert McKeever and Philip Davies, Politics USA (Longman)
  • Robert Singh, Governing America (Oxford)
  • Thomas Dye, Politics in America (Pearson)
  • Gillian Peele, Developments in American Politics (Oxford)
  • David McKay, Controversies in American Politics and Society (Blackwell)