Known for its clear narrative voice and impeccable scholarship, Alan Brinkley's best-selling survey text invites students to think critically about the many forces that continually create the Unfinished Nation that is the United States. In a concise but wide-ranging narrative, Brinkley shows the diversity and complexity of the nation and our understanding of its history--one that continues to evolve both in the events of the present and in our reexamination of new evidence and perspectives on the past.

This book opens a new line of inquiry into the Old English poem, specifically trauma theory, which attempts to map the psychological typography of an author and his or her culture, that is, when the text appears to be wrought of traumatic experience.  Indicators of a "trauma text" are narrative techniques often associated with postmodernism -- expressly, intertextuality, repetition, a dispersed or fragmented voice, and a search for powerful language.  The anonymous Beowulf poet made extensive use of all four narrative techniques, suggesting he and his culture were suffering from traumatic stress.

The last twenty or so years have seen a phenomenal expansion in the variety of forms of creative and narrative audiovisual expression. The increasing role of relatively recent developments such as the internet, mobile telephony and computer gaming, which complement the narrative representation of more traditional media, seems to have acted as a catalyst to unfreeze the standard types of story form that had been appearing on screens for over a hundred years.

This study of narrative technique in Victorian novels introduces the concept of "narrative annexes" whereby unexpected characters, impermissible subjects and plot-changing events enter fictional worlds that otherwise exclude them, challenging Victorian cultural and literary norms.

Little attention has been paid to the political and ideological significance of the exemplum, a brief narrative form used to illustrate a moral. Through a study of four major works in the Chaucerian tradition (The Canterbury Tales, John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Thomas Hoccleve's Regement of Princes, and Lydgate's Fall of Princes), Scanlon redefines the exemplum as a 'narrative enactment of cultural authority'.