American Tropics refers to a kind of extended Caribbean, an area which includes the southern USA, the Atlantic littoral of Central America, the Caribbean islands, and northern South America. European colonial powers fought intensively here against indigenous populations and against each other for control of land and resources. This area shares a history in which the dominant fact is the arrival of millions of white Europeans and black Africans; shares an environment which is tropical or sub-tropical; and shares a socio-economic model (the plantation), whose effects lasted at least well into the twentieth century. The imaginative space of the American Tropics therefore offers a differently-centred literary history from those conventionally produced as US, Caribbean, or Latin American literature. This important collection brings together essays by distinguished scholars including the late Neil Whitehead, Richard Price, Sally Price and Peter Hulme to engage with the idea of a literary geography of the American Tropics and which represent the rich diversity of the writing produced within its geographical area.