A massively erudite and elegantly written book, Anxieties of Experience takes its readers on a hemispheric journey through modern times, leading up to the present. Comparing and contrasting the literatures of North and South America is ultimately, for Lawrence, a means of examining whether a bookish life is a life lived to the fullest. With its sustained line of inquiry across corpora, the volume makes a valuable contribution to several fields of study-while
also introducing general readers to hemispheric studies.
Jeffrey Lawrence is Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers-New Brunswick.