The contributors to this collection of essays seek to base the study of American literature beyond the geographical, nation-based paradigm, which has so far defined the discipline. This search, the editor suggests, is the response to two historical events, the attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 and the devastation resulting from Hurricane Katrina. Both have made obvious that the jurisdictional notion of territorial sovereignty cannot withstand the militant or physical forces that expose the nation as “a legal fiction, a man-made fiction” (1).

Substituting the planet as a larger disciplinary category, the collection avoids a simple opposition between national and global. The editors suggest different metaphors to highlight their broadened field of inquiry as a dynamic exchange, not marked by the hierarchical relationship of part to whole: the mathematical concept of set and subset, the musical metaphor of a sliding register, or that of “nesting,” “a generative process that modulates continually from the outside to the inside, from the background to the foreground, with several units, differently scaled, reciprocally cradling one another and overlapping with one another, creating an ever wider circumference as well as an ever greater recessional depth” (4).

What constitutes the national is a familiar point of tension in American literature. For example, it has taken shape in debates over regional versus national literature: it can be detected in the non-geographic ethnic regionalism of the early twentieth century or even the regionalisms of gender and race in the 1980s. However, Shades of the Planet creates new webs of affiliation. At their best, the contributors invent fields that transcend jurisdictional borders while providing tangible and concrete realms of evidence – the ecological (Buell), the continent (Adams), or linguistic forces – demonstrating that “Distances vary with human ties” (295, Dimock).

What changes, then, for the americanist who wants to practice planetary criticism? The call for “planetary” literary research requires mastery of greater linguistic and historical spans, probably “beyond the competence of most of us” (8). It favors the antebellum phase and the roughly defined post-World War II period after 1980, in which American literature avoids a strong national impulse and draws alternative maps (Giles): Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Philip Roth, Leslie Silko, and Gloria Naylor receive much attention. It thus eliminates, with some modernist exceptions, those writers who were of central importance to Alfred Kazin's On Native Grounds, which, begun about sixty years before the publication of Shades of the Planet and likewise responding to historical events (i.e. the economic depression of the 1930s and the rise of fascism), coincided with the foundation of the discipline of American literature.