Celebrating the 80th birthday of Winfried Fluck, this volume of REAL gathers leading US-American and European literary scholars from English and American Studies to engage one of the most important European scholars of American Studies. Each of the volume's twelve dialogues consists of a republished essay by Fluck and a response by one his interlocutors, written specifically for this occasion. Covered topics range from the aesthetics of early American literature to the history of our digital present and from the Americanization of literary studies to the search for American democratic culture.

Modern cities offer a stage for the emergence, development, and negotiation of transcultural spaces. Here, the dialogue/struggle between urbanity, ecology, and the environment is experienced in its most visible form. Tensions between the creative and destructive aspects of global cities reverberate throughout the humanities. In the wake of the recent politicization of the humanities and especially the ‘transnational turn’ within the discipline of American Studies, the ‘environment’ and ‘culture’ have increasingly been represented as hybrid entities. This volume addresses a number of questions that are related to the symbolic construction of transcultural spaces in academic and literary discourse: How should – and how can – an interdisciplinary approach react productively to the post-ecological turn of the 2000s? What contributions have literary and cinematic fiction, the visual arts, and other discourses in Germany and the United States made to participate in a dialogue on environmental and technological issues? How are we, as scholars of American studies, to deal with the challenges of the ongoing environmental crisis which is, by all means, also a crisis of technological progress? The individual contributions to this anthology discuss both the modes of amalgamation and hybridisation by which city and nature are constituted as complementary figures as well as the emergence of ‘transethnic,’ ‘posturban’ and ‘virtual’ environments.

Can the concept of American democratic culture provide a framework for the interpretation and critique of contemporary American populisms? Have contemporary United States writers, artists and activists imagined modes of democratic sociality that constitute the precondition for yet are irreducible to extant populist imaginaries? How has the fracturing of the media infrastructure contributed to Donald Trump's strain of populism? Do the modes of analysis devised to diagnose twentieth century populisms provide adequate frameworks to understand Trump's movement? The disparate yet complementary perspectives from which its contributors engage these and related questions promise to enhance the explanatory potential of this volume of REAL.