It is a daunting – and frankly impossible – task to cover hundreds of years of American literature in less than two hundred pages, let alone to contextualize that literature historically, culturally, and politically. Professor Castillo's contribution to the Wiley-Blackwell “in context” series moves readers capably and briskly from pre-contact indigenous oral traditions and codices in Meso- and North America to Walt Whitman's “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed.” Her study mines literary-critical insights developed during the era of canon-busting, when literary historians renewed their interest in literature by women and by minorities, and included forms like spirituals, oral legends and popular literature.

Having produced an extraordinary anthology – The Literature of Colonial America – with Ivy T. Schweitzer, Castillo draws on the intercultural and trans-American range of that volume for her discussions of sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonial writings. Castillo tours readers through the familiar pantheon of Spanish colonization –Columbus, Las Casas, Cabeza de Vaca – while orienting readers toward Native American literature like the Popul Vuh, genres like earthdiver and trickster tales, and historical issues like the Atlantic world system, and toward intercultural productions like the work of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and the cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Her treatment of the British colonies keeps clearly in sight French, Dutch and Spanish colonies, and the transatlantic market for tobacco, sugar, slaves and captivity narratives.

Her treatment narrows considerably past the Revolution, to literature published in English in the United States. Here she marches readers through an expanded canon of political writers, early poets and novelists, women, and African American and Native American writers in a chapter on “the struggle for identity.” Cooper and Irving, Elias Boudinot and William Apess are squeezed into a chapter on the Transcendentalists and American expansion – along with Catherine Maria Sedgwick and Margaret Fuller – a chapter where her sympathies seemingly reside with Hawthorne, who gets the lengthiest and most critically sensitive treatment. Poe, Melville, Dickinson and Whitman get their own chapter as “originals” and the book concludes with a hodge-podge chapter on abolitionism, the women's movement and the Civil War that bounces from David Walker's “Appeal” (1829), to Linda Kerber's Republican Motherhood, to Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, slave narratives and early novels, and Lincoln's emancipation proclamation and assassination.

The “in context” series is perhaps most useful for newcomers to a field, but can hardly be satisfying for serious students. Castillo cannot be blamed for the constraints of space and the necessity to cover so much ground given the way the field has expanded over the last three decades. What I do miss are the more innovative critical approaches flourishing especially in the past fifteen years or so – transatlantic, trans-American and circum-Caribbean studies of US literature between 1776 and 1865, key work on the political and economic contexts that inform gothic expressions of US literature from Brockden Brown to Poe and beyond, and studies of sensational literature, regional literatures and print culture.