This book is described on its cover as "America singing, celebrating itself and becoming altogether different, plural, singular, new". Luckily, the contents don't bear out this frighteningly wholesome agenda. Greil Marcus, the better known of the two editors, specialises in rich and wilful explorations of high and low culture. It's not surprising that a book with him as one of its devisers should contain articles about Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Hank Williams and Irving Berlin, Chaplin, Some Like It Hot and Psycho. More unexpected but equally successful is the inclusion of essays on technology (the Winchester rifle, the linotype machine) and institutions such as Pentecostalism, the Book of the Month Club and Alcoholics Anonymous.

The other editor, Werner Sollors, has written books called Neither Black Nor White Yet Both and Ethnic Modernism. I'm not suggesting that his contribution is entirely concerned with ethnicity, but the book is a striking anthology of racial attitudes. Black anger old-style is expressed by Ishmael Reed in a rant only loosely based on Huckleberry Finn: "Twain exposes... this exotic yearning of those who despise blacks yet wish to imitate them. Who wish to be called 'honey' by them. Who wish to be 'petted' by them. Who wish to burn them, cut out their very entrails and take them home with them. If you can't give us our nigger, they seem to say, we'll make do with Elvis." It's doubtful if this is as effective a challenge to received ideas as Leslie Fiedler's suggestion (in "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey", an essay written in 1948) that the racial dynamics of classic American literature include a strong element of same-sex longing.

Certainly, belligerence is preferable to the banality of artist Kara Walker's celebration of the election of Obama, in words ("WTF? No, not 'World Trade Federation', nor 'White Tyranny Forever', nor 'Who's That Fellow?' BUT 'What the Fuck?'") and images based on paper cut-outs, representing dancers, Civil War soldiers and bodies dangling from trees. Some of the shapes have been folded over before cutting so as to look like table decorations. Slogans, silhouettes and doilies  not much of a cultural response to a social and political breakthrough, but at least it hasn't dated in the year since the election, thanks to not saying anything that could be disproved.

There's a lot of mediocre writing on offer here; academics don't always have the knack of making their specialities infectious. Describing neglected Depression-era writers from racial minorities, Yael Schacher writes: "In the post-World War I period, varieties of estrangement distinguish colonial and assimilated ethnic characters." And here is Avital Ronell going into such Freudian rhapsodies over the telephone it hardly seems an invention at all, rather a manifestation of Alexander Graham Bell's psychopathology: "There is an opening, a wound for holding the other, for giving voice to the other's suffering and keeping close a fugitive alterity."

The essayists who do the most disservice to their writer heroes are those who merely pat them into place in their niche in the canon, declaring for instance that Toni Morrison along with Alice Walker and Maya Angelou "remade the American literary landscape" with "language that was often itself a wonder". It begins to seem that being welcomed into the canon is like being embalmed and slid into Lenin's tomb, for crowds to shuffle past with their heads bowed.

Still, when individual contributions shine they lift the whole enterprise, such as Michael Tolkin's disconcerting piece about Alcoholics Anonymous ("a religion which may yet save the world"), or Kathleen Moran admitting, in her piece on the San Francisco earthquake, that when the centenary of the event came round she looked out the earthquake-preparedness kit that had been buried in a cupboard for decades.

Hats off, though, to the editors above all, for constructing a volume where each element reinforces every other, often by contradicting it, so that the whole vast book is more exciting than even its most impressive part.