America is a nation making itself up as it goes along--a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history. In more than two hundred original essays, this book brings together the nation's many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what "Made in America" means. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoric--cultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape.--From publisher description.

Through personal essays and poetry, short fiction and painting, book reviews, interviews, performance pieces, and hybrid creations of text and image, Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba opens a window onto the meaning of nationality, transnationalism, and homeland in our time. For more than thirty-five years U.S.-Cuban relations have been couched in terms of the Cold War, often pitting Cubans in the diaspora against Cubans who remain in their homeland. Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba celebrates the informal networks that Cubans in both countries have maintained through artistic, academic, family, and other ties. The book brings together for the first time in English Cuban voices of the second generation, both on the island and in the diaspora. The multivocal and multigenre collection includes both scholarly and creative writing and an impressive range of visual art. The participants are earnest, angry, witty, and hopeful. They are sometimes visionaries, but they are not deluded about Cuban or North American realities. Their voices offer testimony to the continuing efforts of Cubans and Cuban-Americans to look beyond the animosities and failings of their respective societies and find possibilities for personal and international reconciliation, dialogue, and renewal. "Ruth Behar, as editor of Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba, leaps across conventional intellectual boundaries in an effort to show the complexity of nationhood, exile, and revolution in the Cuban experience of the last thirty years. An important book about the possibility and impossibility of building cultural and political bridges."--Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones, Princeton University "Behar narrows the straits of Florida with a richly textured dialogue of voices in and out of Cuba. Bridges to Cuba is sure to make history."--Liz Balmaseda, Miami Herald "A vital and interesting anthology about contemporary Cuba."--Oscar Hijuelos, author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love " Bridges to Cuba is the first U.S. anthology that looks at Cuban creativity from an integrated perspective, refusing to kneel before the painful and often arbitrary divisions that have split the voices of this passionate culture into forever separate bands. The results are magnificent. Read this book and get a long overdue understanding of contemporary Cuban literature and art."--Margaret Randall, author of Women in Cuba: Twenty Years Later "In order for memory to be recovered, there must be a community that remembers and tells the story. . . . Bridges to Cuba displays a wealth of insights that leave the reader with a sense of having experienced first hand the intricate web of thought and feeling that is Cuban life."--Latino Review of Books "Ruth Behar's anthology represents one of the most important and moving bridges yet published on contemporary Cuba and its condition as the island that is still absent from the Western world. Bridges to Cuba is an extraordinary example of the faith and ability of Latin American intellectuals to cross true bridges, bridges of solidarity."--Marjorie Agosín, Wellesley College Ruth Behar is author of Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story and coeditor, with Deborah Gordon, of Women Writing Culture. She has been the recipient of awards from the MacArthur and Guggenheim foundations.

The purpose of this study is to find out how and why the "poetics of fiction" arose, its sources, and the materials from which it was created. A series of cultural choices made in archaic and classical Greece produced a clash between the traditional "poetics of truth", which derived poetry from divine inspiration and in the last analysis did not construe the poem as a work of art at all, and the new "poetics of fiction", which derived poetry from art. The eventual succession of the latter, culminating with the Poetics of Aristotle, amounted to an aesthetic revolution because, as a result of it, literary fiction, which since then has become a necessary framework for both the theory and practice of literature in Western tradition, was for the first time separated from non-fiction and given a status of its own.

Using pagan prose fiction produced in Greek and Latin during the early Christian era, Bowersock investigates the complex relationship among perceived and presented 'historical' and 'fictional' truths. Bowersock's superb lecturing style is successfully transferred into writing with force and eloquence, as he weaves accounts from a wide range of sources into his text, illuminating social attitudes of the period and persuasively arguing that fiction of the period was influenced by the emerging Christian Gospel narratives. In the second half of the first century emerges a new kind of fiction including outlandish tales of travel, romance and comic novels. Bowersock concentrates on secular literature, illuminating not only its literary motifs, but also reconstructing the societal context as one engrossed in fabrications and all kinds of revisions or rewriting. Using these less familiar materials as his points of reference, he reads into familiar Christian material, making linkages and casting new light on familiar subjects, as well as providing some provocative interpretations of familiar Christian texts. Bowersock uses close historical and literary analyses of specific passages of works, and pays attention to larger and more general issues and questions around the relationship between fiction and history and how we read them. This book will be of basic intellectual concern to all raised in the environment of Christian belief.