Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture

Series · 41

books · 1987-2019

By Tim Armstrong, Michael W. Clune, Gavin Jones, and more

Books in series

The American Historical Romance

1987

Dekker traces the American historical novel from its origins in the early 1800s to the beginning of World War II, examining the genre's connections with Enlightenment and Romantic theories of history, the rise of literary regionalism, the ambitions of Romantic writers to revive the epic and romance, changing gender roles, and individual authors' troubled responses to the modern era's great revolutionary and imperialistic conflicts. Though concerned with the historical romance's development, Dekker devotes most of this book to new readings of major texts by James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Allen Tate, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and William Faulkner, as well as to the Briton whose name is synonymous with the genre, Sir Walter Scott.

Conspiracy and Romance

Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville

1989

Robert Levine examines the American romance in a new historical context. His book offers a fresh reading of the genre, establishing its importance to American culture between the founding of the Republic and the Civil War. With convincing historical and literary detail, Levine shows that anxieties about foreign elements—French revolutionaries, secret societies, Catholic immigrants, African slaves—are central to the fictional worlds of Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne and Melville. Ormond, The Bravo, The Blithedale Romance, and Benito Cereno are persuasively explicated by Levine to demonstrate that the romance dramatized the same conflicts and ideals that gave rise to the American Republic. Americans conceived "America" as a historical romance, and their romances dramatize the historical conditions of the culture. The fear that reputed conspiracies would subvert the order and integrity of the new nation were recurrent and widespread; Levine illuminates the influence of such fears on the works of major romance writers during this period.

#15

A House Undivided

Domesticity and Community in American Literature

1990

A whole range of American writers have focused on images of household, domestic virtue, and the feminine or feminized hero. This important new book examines the persistence and flexibility of such themes in the work of classic writers from Ann Bradstreet through Jefferson and Franklin to Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. Without minimizing the differences that divide these figures, Anderson shows the extent to which, in their various circumstances, they were all committed to a common enterprise—a social and cultural reconstruction based on the domestic values of the ideal private household.

#18

American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition

1991

Professional philosophers have tended either to shrug off American philosophy as negligible or derivative or to date American philosophy from the work of twentieth century analytical positivists such as Quine. Russell Goodman expands on the revisionist position developed by Stanley Cavell, that the most interesting strain of American thought proceeds not from Puritan theology or from empirical science but from a peculiarly American kind of Romanticism. This insight leads Goodman, through Cavell, back to Emerson and Thoreau and thence to William James and John Dewey, as they assimilated to American circumstances and intellectual habits the currents of European thought from Kant to Wittgenstein.

#25

The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story

1993

The Culture and Commerce of the Short Story is a cultural and historical account of the birth and development of the American short story from the time of Poe. It describes how America - through political movements, changes in education, magazine editorial policy and the work of certain individuals - built the short story as an image of itself and continues to use the genre as a locale within the realm of art where American political ideals can be rehearsed, debated and turned into literary forms. While the focus of this book is cultural, individual authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Edith Wharton are examined as representative of the phenomenon. As part of its project, this book also contains a history of creative writing and the workshop dating back a century. Andrew Levy makes a strong case for the centrality of the short story as a form of art in American life and provides an explanation for the genre's resurgence and ongoing success.

#45

The Complicity of Imagination

The American Renaissance, Contests of Authority, and Seventeenth-Century English Culture

1997

The Complicity of Imagination examines the rich and complex relationship among four nineteenth-century authors and the culture and politics of seventeenth-century England. This study portrays an American Renaissance whose writers were deeply enough read in the literature and controversies of seventeenth-century England to appropriate its cultural artifacts for their own purposes. By exploring the broader cultural implications of intertextual relationships, this book demonstrates how literary texts participate in the artistic, political, and theological tensions within American culture.

#54

Poe and the Printed Word

2000

In Poe and the Printed Word Kevin Hayes reappraises the work of Edgar Allan Poe in the context of nineteenth-century print culture. Hayes examines how publishing opportunities of the time shaped Poe's development as a writer and explores the different methods of publication he employed as a showcase for his verse, criticism and fiction. Beginning with Poe's early exposure to the printed word, and ending with the ambitious magazine and book projects of his final years, this study is part biography, part literary history and part history of the book.

#57

American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880–1995

1997

Focusing on key works of late-nineteenth and early- twentieth-century American literary realism, Phillip Barrish traces the emergence of new ways of gaining intellectual prestige—that is, new ways of gaining some degree of cultural recognition. Through extended readings of works by Henry James, William Dean Howells, Abraham Cahan, and Edith Wharton, Barrish emphasizes the differences between realist modes of cultural authority and those associated with the rise of the social sciences.

#61

Democracy, Revolution, and Monarchism in Early American Literature

1998

Paul Downes offers a radical revision of some of the most cherished elements of early American cultural identity. The founding texts and writers of the Republic, he claims, did not wholly displace what they claimed to oppose. Instead, Downes argues, the entire construction of a Republican public sphere actually borrowed and adapted central features of Monarchical rule. Downes discovers this theme not only in a wide range of American novels, but also in readings of a variety of political documents that created the philosophical culture of the American revolutionary period.

#64

Henry James and Queer Modernity

1999

Eric Haralson examines the far-reaching changes in gender politics and the emergence of modern male homosexuality in writings of Henry James and three authors greatly influenced by Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway. Emphasizing American masculinity portrayed in fiction between 1875 and 1935, Haralson traces James' engagement with sexual politics from his first novels of the 1870s to his "major phase" at the turn of the century.

#66

Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature, 1860–1930

2003

Race, Work and Desire analyses literary representations of work relationships across the colour-line from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Michele Birnbaum examines inter-racial bonds in fiction and literary correspondence by black and white authors and artists - including Elizabeth Keckley, Frances E. W. Harper, W. D. Howells, Grace King, Kate Chopin, Langston Hughes, Amy Spingarn and Carl Van Vechten - exploring the way servants and employers, doctors and patients, and patrons and artists negotiate their racial differences for artistic and political ends. Situating these relationships in literary and cultural context, Birnbaum argues that the literature reveals the complexity of cross-racial relations in the workplace, which, although often represented as an oasis of racial harmony, is in fact the very site where race politics are most fiercely engaged. This study productively complicates current debates about cross-racial collaboration in American literary and race studies, and will be of interest to scholars in both literary and cultural studies.

#68

New England's Crises and Cultural Memory

Literature, Politics, History, Religion, 1620–1860

2004

John McWilliams' book is an ambitious attempt to review New England history and literature from the Puritans through the Revolutionary period to the antebellum era. McWilliams demonstrates how successive narratives of crises, real or imagined, reflected historical realities which proved adaptable to later settlers. Offering an all-encompassing narrative of one crucial region in the American literary and historical experience, he brings to light new contexts for understanding crucial events in early American literature and history.

#73

Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830–1860

2005

Examining the literature of slavery and race before the Civil War, Maurice Lee, in this 2005 book, demonstrates how the slavery crisis became a crisis of philosophy that exposed the breakdown of national consensus and the limits of rational authority. Poe, Stowe, Douglass, Melville, and Emerson were among the antebellum authors who tried - and failed - to find rational solutions to the slavery conflict. Unable to mediate the slavery controversy as the nation moved toward war, their writings form an uneasy transition between the confident rationalism of the American Enlightenment and the more skeptical thought of the pragmatists. Lee draws on antebellum moral philosophy, political theory, and metaphysics, bringing a different perspective to the literature of slavery - one that synthesizes cultural studies and intellectual history to argue that romantic, sentimental, and black Atlantic writers all struggled with modernity when facing the slavery crisis.

#76

Race, Slavery, and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

2006

Moving boldly between literary analysis and political theory, contemporary and antebellum US culture, Arthur Riss invites readers to rethink prevailing accounts of the relationship between slavery, liberalism, and literary representation. Situating Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass at the center of antebellum debates over the person-hood of the slave, this 2006 book examines how a nation dedicated to the proposition that 'all men are created equal' formulates arguments both for and against race-based slavery. This revisionary argument promises to be unsettling for literary critics, political philosophers, historians of US slavery, as well as those interested in the link between literature and human rights.

#78

The Origins of American Literature Studies

An Institutional History

2007

Although American literature is a standard subject in the American college curriculum, a century ago few people thought it should be taught there. Elizabeth Renker uncovers the complex historical process through which American literature overcame its image of aesthetic and historical inferiority to become an important field for academic study and research. Renker's extensive original archival research focuses on four institutions of higher education serving distinct regional, class, race and gender populations. She argues that American literature's inferior image arose from its affiliation with non-elite schools, teachers and students, and that it had to overcome this social identity in order to achieve status as serious knowledge. Renker's revisionary analysis is an important contribution to the intellectual history of the United States and will be of interest to anyone studying, teaching or researching American literature.

#79

Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the Nineteenth Century

2007

Theo Davis offers a fresh account of the emergence of a national literature in the United States. Taking American literature's universalism as an organising force that must be explained rather than simply exposed, she contends that Emerson, Hawthorne, and Stowe's often noted investigations of experience are actually based in a belief that experience is an abstract category governed by typicality, not the property of the individual subject. Additionally, these authors locate the form of the literary work in the domain of abstract experience, projected out of - not embodied in - the text. After tracing the emergence of these beliefs out of Scottish common sense philosophy and through early American literary criticism, Davis analyses how American authors' prose seeks to work an art of abstract experience. In so doing, she reconsiders the place of form in modern literary studies.

#80

Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms

2008

Modernist poetry crosses racial and national boundaries. The emergence of poetic modernism in the Americas was profoundly shaped by transatlantic contexts of empire-building and migration. In this ambitious book, Anita Patterson examines cross-currents of influence among a range of American, African American and Caribbean authors. Works by Whitman, Poe, Eliot, Pound and their avant-garde contemporaries served as a heritage for black poets in the US and elsewhere in the New World. In tracing these connections, Patterson argues for a renewed focus on intercultural and transnational dialogue in modernist studies. This bold and imaginative work of transnational literary and historical criticism sets canonical American figures in fascinating contexts and opens up readings of Langston Hughes, Derek Walcott, and Aime Cesaire. This book will be of interest to scholars of American and African American literature, modernism, postcolonial studies, and Caribbean literature.

#81

Multilingual America

Language and the Making of American Literature

2008

Throughout its history, America has been the scene of multiple encounters between communities speaking different languages. Literature has long sought to represent these encounters in various ways, from James Fenimore Cooper’s frontier fictions to the Jewish-American writers who popularised Yiddish as a highly influential modern vernacular. While other studies have concentrated on isolated parts of this history, Lawrence Rosenwald’s book is the first to consider the whole story of linguistic representation in American literature, and to consider as well how multilingual fictions can be translated and incorporated into a national literary history. He uses case studies to analyse the most important kinds of linguistic encounters, such as those between Europeans and Native Americans, those between slaveholders and African slaves, and those between immigrants and American citizens. This ambitious, engaging book is an important contribution to the study of American literature, history and culture.

#82

Imagining Equality in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

2008

The theme of inequality has often dominated academic criticism, which has been concerned with identifying, analyzing, and demystifying various regimes of power and the illicit hierarchies upon which they are built. Studies of the United States in the nineteenth century have followed this trend in focusing on slavery, women's writing, and working-class activism. Kerry Larson advocates the importance of looking instead at equality as a central theme, viewing it not as an endangered ideal to strive for and protect but as an imagined social reality in its own right, one with far-reaching consequences. In this original study, he reads the literature of the pre-Civil War United States against Tocqueville's theories of equality. Imagining Equality tests these theories in the work of a broad array of authors and genres, both canonical and non-canonical, and in doing so discovers important themes in Stowe, Hawthorne, Douglass and Alcott.

#83

American Literature and the Free Market, 1945–2000

2009

The years after World War Two have seen a widespread fascination with the free market. In this book, Michael W. Clune considers this fascination in postwar literature. In the fictional worlds created by works ranging from Frank O'Hara's poetry to nineties gangster rap, the market is transformed, offering an alternative form of life, distinct from both the social visions of the left and the individualist ethos of the right. These ideas also provide an unsettling example of how art takes on social power by offering an escape from society. American Literature and the Free Market presents a new perspective on a number of wide ranging works for readers of American post-war literature.

#84

Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature

2010

Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature offers a rich, interdisciplinary treatment of modern black literature and cultural history, showing how debates over Africa in the works of major black writers generated productive models for imagining political agency. Yogita Goyal analyzes the tensions between romance and realism in the literature of the African diaspora, examining a remarkably diverse group of twentieth-century authors, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Chinua Achebe, Richard Wright, Ama Ata Aidoo and Caryl Phillips. Shifting the center of black diaspora studies by considering Africa as constitutive of black modernity rather than its forgotten past, Goyal argues that it is through the figure of romance that the possibility of diaspora is imagined across time and space. Drawing on literature, political history and postcolonial theory, this significant addition to the cross-cultural study of literatures will be of interest to scholars of African American studies, African studies and American literary studies.

#86

The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

2011

For much of the nineteenth century, the nervous system was a medical mystery, inspiring scientific studies and exciting great public interest. Because of this widespread fascination, the nerves came to explain the means by which mind and body related to each other. By the 1830s, the nervous system helped Americans express the consequences on the body, and for society, of major historical changes. Literary writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe, used the nerves as a metaphor to re-imagine the role of the self amidst political, social and religious tumults, including debates about slavery and the revivals of the Second Great Awakening. Representing the 'romance' of the nervous system and its cultural impact thoughtfully and, at times, critically, the fictional experiments of this century helped construct and explore a neurological vision of the body and mind. Murison explains the impact of neurological medicine on nineteenth-century literature and culture.

#87

The Logic of Slavery

Debt, Technology, and Pain in American Literature

2012

In American history and throughout the Western world, the subjugation perpetuated by slavery has created a unique “culture of slavery.” That culture exists as a metaphorical, artistic, and literary tradition attached to the enslaved – human beings whose lives are “owed” to another, who are used as instruments by another, and who must endure suffering in silence. Tim Armstrong explores the metaphorical legacy of slavery in American culture by investigating debt, technology, and pain in African-American literature and a range of other writings and artworks. Armstrong's careful analysis reveals how notions of the slave as a debtor lie hidden in our accounts of the commodified self and how writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison grapple with the pervasive view that slaves are akin to machines. Finally, Armstrong examines how conceptions of the slave as a container of suppressed pain are reflected in disciplines as diverse as art, sculpture, music, and psychology.

#88

Melville and the Idea of Blackness

Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth Century America

2012

By examining the unique problems that "blackness" signifies in Moby-Dick, Pierre, "Benito Cereno," and "The Encantadas," Christopher Freeburg analyzes how Herman Melville grapples with the social realities of racial difference in nineteenth-century America. Where Melville's critics typically read blackness as either a metaphor for the haunting power of slavery or an allegory of moral evil, Freeburg asserts that blackness functions as the site where Melville correlates the sociopolitical challenges of transatlantic slavery and U.S. colonial expansion with philosophical concerns about mastery. By focusing on Melville's iconic interracial encounters, Freeburg reveals the important role blackness plays in Melville's portrayal of characters' arduous attempts to seize their own destiny, amass scientific knowledge, and perfect themselves. A valuable resource for scholars and graduate students in American literature, this text will also appeal to those working in American, African American, and postcolonial studies.

#89

The Poetics of Sovereignty in American Literature, 1885–1910

2012

During the Progressive Era, the United States regularly suspended its own laws to regulate racialized populations. Judges and administrators relied on the rhetoric of sovereignty to justify such legal practices, while in American popular culture, sovereignty helped authors coin tropes that have become synonymous with American exceptionalism today. In this book, Andrew Hebard challenges the notion of sovereignty as a “state of exception” in American jurisprudence and literature at the turn of the twentieth century. Hebard explores how literary trends such as romance and realism helped conventionalize, and thereby sanction, the federal government's use of sovereignty in a range of foreign and domestic policy matters, including the regulation of overseas colonies, immigration, Native American lands, and extra-legal violence in the American South. Weaving historiography with close readings of Mark Twain, the western, and other hallmarks of Progressive Era literature, Hebard's study offers a new cultural context for understanding the legal history of race relations in the United States.

#90

Environmental Practice and Early American Literature

2013

This original and provocative study tells the story of American literary history from the perspective of its environmental context. Weaving together close readings of early American texts with ecological histories of tobacco, potatoes, apples, and honey bees, Michael Ziser presents a method for literary criticism that explodes the conceptual distinction between the civilized and natural world. Beginning with the English exploration of Virginia in the sixteenth century, Ziser argues that the settlement of the “New World” – and the cultivation and exploitation of its bounty – dramatically altered how writers used language to describe the phenomena they encountered on the frontier. Examining the work of Harriot, Grainger, Cooper, Thoreau and others, Ziser reveals how these authors, whether consciously or not, transcribed the vibrant ecology of North America, and the ways that the environment helped codify a uniquely American literary aesthetic of lasting importance.

#91

Failure and the American Writer

A Literary History

2014

If America worships success, then why has the nation's literature dwelled obsessively on failure? This book explores encounters with failure by nineteenth-century writers - ranging from Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville to Mark Twain and Sarah Orne Jewett - whose celebrated works more often struck readers as profoundly messy, flawed, and even perverse. Reading textual inconsistency against the backdrop of a turbulent nineteenth century, Gavin Jones describes how the difficulties these writers faced in their faltering search for new styles, coherent characters, and satisfactory endings uncovered experiences of blunder and inadequacy hidden in the culture at large. Through Jones' treatment, these American writers emerge as the great theorists of failure who discovered ways to translate their own social insecurities into complex portrayals of a modern self, founded in moral fallibility, precarious knowledge, and negative feelings.

#92

Visualizing Blackness and the Creation of the African American Literary Tradition

2013

Negative stereotypes of African Americans have long been disseminated through the visual arts. This original and incisive study examines how black writers use visual tropes as literary devices to challenge readers' conceptions of black identity. Lena Hill charts two hundred years of African American literary history, from Phillis Wheatley to Ralph Ellison, and engages with a variety of canonical and lesser-known writers. Chapters interweave literary history, museum culture, and visual analysis of numerous illustrations with close readings of Booker T. Washington, Gwendolyn Bennett, Zora Neale Hurston, Melvin Tolson, and others. Together, these sections register the degree to which African American writers rely on vision – its modes, consequences, and insights – to demonstrate black intellectual and cultural sophistication. Hill's provocative study will interest scholars and students of African American literature and American literature more broadly.

#93

Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture

2014

Thomas Pynchon and the American Counterculture employs the revolutionary sixties as a lens through which to view the anarchist politics of Pynchon's novels. Joanna Freer identifies and elucidates Pynchon's commentaries on such groups as the Beats, the New Left and the Black Panther Party and on such movements as the psychedelic movement and the women's movement, drawing out points of critique to build a picture of a complex countercultural sensibility at work in Pynchon's fiction. In emphasising the subtleties of Pynchon's responses to counterculture, Freer clarifies his importance as an intellectually rigorous political philosopher. She further suggests that, like the graffiti in Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon creates texts that are 'revealed in order to be thought about, expanded on, translated into action by the people', his early attraction to core countercultural values growing into a conscious, politically motivated writing project that reaches its most mature expression in Against the Day.

#94

Politics and Skepticism in Antebellum American Literature

2014

In confronting their tumultuous time, antebellum American writers often invoked unrevealable secrets. Five of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s most inventive interlocutors - Melville, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Douglass, and Jacobs - produced their most riveting political thought in response to Emerson’s idea that moods fundamentally shape one’s experience of the world, changing only through secret causes that no one fully grasps. In this volume, Dominic Mastroianni frames antebellum and Civil War literature within the history of modern philosophical skepticism, ranging from Descartes and Hume to Levinas and Cavell, arguing that its political significance lies only partially in its most overt engagement with political issues like slavery, revolution, reform, and war. It is when antebellum writing is most philosophical, figurative, and seemingly unworldly that its political engagement is most profound. Mastroianni offers new readings of six major American authors and explores the teeming archive of nineteenth-century print culture.

#95

American Poetic Materialism from Whitman to Stevens

2014

In American Poetic Materialism from Whitman to Stevens, Mark Noble examines writers who share the assumption that personhood can be understood as a material event. Through new readings of Whitman, Emerson, Santayana, and Stevens, Noble uncovers a literary history wrestling with the consequences of its own materialism, and asks what this account of shared materiality can tell us about the most profoundly secular models of the modern subject. At a moment when several new models of the relationship between human experience and its physical ground circulate among critical theorists and philosophers of science, American Poetic Materialism explores poets who have long asked what our materiality can tell us about our prospects for new models of our material selves.

#96

The Poetry of Disturbance

The Discomforts of Postwar American Poetry

2015

In The Poetry of Disturbance, David Bergman argues that post-war poetry underwent a significant if subtle shift in emphasis, moving from the modernist concern with the poem as a visual text to one that was chiefly oral in nature. The resulting change was disturbing, especially for those brought up on the principles of high modernism. This new stress on orality implied a shift in the economy of the poem, away from the austerity of language advocated by Pound and Eliot to a style that conveyed freedom, expansiveness, and an innovative directness.

#97

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War

2015

American literature in the nineteenth century is often divided into two halves, neatly separated by the Civil War. In Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War, Cody Marrs argues that the war is a far more elastic boundary forliterary history than has frequently been assumed. Focusing on the later writings of Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, andEmily Dickinson, this book shows how the war took imaginative shapeacross, and even beyond, the nineteenth century, inflecting literaryforms and expressions for decades after 1865. These writers, Marrsdemonstrates, are best understood not as antebellum or postbellumfigures but as transbellum authors who cipher their later experiencesthrough their wartime impressions and prewar ideals. This book is abold, revisionary contribution to debates about temporality,periodization, and the shape of American literary history.

#98

Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America

2015

Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America examines how mass democracy was understood before public opinion could be measured by polls. It argues that fiction, in its freedom to represent what resists representation, develops the most groundbreaking theories of the democratic public. These literary accounts of democracy focus less on overt pubic action than the profound effects of everyday social encounters. This book thus departs from recent scholarship, which emphasizes the responsibilities of citizenship and the achievements of oppositional social movements. It demonstrates how novels and stories by Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Fanny Fern, Harriet Jacobs, and James Fenimore Cooper attempt to understand a public organized not only by explicitly political discourse, but by informal and disorganized social networks.

#99

Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature

2015

Hobbes, Sovereignty and Early American Literature pursues the question of democratic sovereignty as it was anticipated, theorized and resisted in the American colonies and in the early United States. It proposes that orthodox American liberal accounts of political community need to be supplemented and challenged by the deeply controversial theory of sovereignty that was articulated in Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (1651). This book offers a radical re-evaluation of Hobbes' political theory and demonstrates how a renewed attention to key Hobbesean ideas might inform inventive re-readings of major American literary, religious and political texts. Ranging from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Puritan attempts to theorize God's sovereignty to revolutionary and founding-era debates over popular sovereignty, this book argues that democratic aspiration still has much to learn from Hobbes' Leviathan and from the powerful liberal resistance it has repeatedly provoked.

#100

Time, Tense, and American Literature

When Is Now?

2015

In Time, Tense, and American Literature, Cindy Weinstein examines canonical American authors who employ a range of tenses to tell a story that has already taken place. This book argues that key texts in the archive of American literature are inconsistent in their retrospective status, ricocheting between past, present and future. Taking 'The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym' as her point of departure, Weinstein shows how Poe's way of representing time involves careening tenses, missing chronometers and inoperable watches, thus establishing a vocabulary of time that is at once anticipated in the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown and further articulated in works by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Theodore Dreiser and Edward P. Jones. Each chapter examines the often strange narrative fabric of these novels and presents an opportunity to understand how especially complicated historical moments, from the founding of the new nation to the psychic consequences of the Civil War, find contextual expression through a literary uncertainty about time.

#102

Postapocalyptic Fantasies in Antebellum American Literature

2017

Even before the Civil War, American writers were imagining life after a massive global catastrophe. For many, the blank slate of the American continent was instead a wreckage-strewn wasteland, a new world in ruins. Bringing together epic and lyric poems, fictional tales, travel narratives, and scientific texts, Postapocalyptic Fantasies in Antebellum American Literature reveals that US authors who enthusiastically celebrated the myths of primeval wilderness and virgin land also frequently resorted to speculations about the annihilation of civilizations, past and future. By examining such postapocalyptic fantasies, this study recovers an antebellum rhetoric untethered to claims for historical exceptionalism - a patriotic rhetoric that celebrates America while denying the United States a unique position outside of world history. As the scientific field of natural history produced new theories regarding biological extinction, geological transformation, and environmental collapse, American writers responded with wild visions of the ancient past and the distant future.

#103

The Poetics of Insecurity

American Fiction and the Uses of Threat

2017

The Poetics of Insecurity turns the emerging field of literary security studies upside down. Rather than tying the prevalence of security to a culture of fear, Johannes Voelz shows how American literary writers of the past two hundred years have mobilized insecurity to open unforeseen and uncharted horizons of possibility for individuals and collectives. In a series of close readings of works by Charles Brockden Brown, Harriet Jacobs, Willa Cather, Flannery O'Connor, and Don DeLillo, Voelz brings to light a cultural imaginary in which conventional meanings of security and insecurity are frequently reversed, so that security begins to appear as deadening and insecurity as enlivening. Timely, broad-ranging, and incisive, Johannes Voelz's study intervenes in debates on American literature as well as in the interdisciplinary field of security studies. It fundamentally challenges our existing explanations for the pervasiveness of security in American cultural and political life.

#105

Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson

2019

In accessible and impassioned discussions of literature and philosophy, this book reveals a surprising approach to the intractable problem of human contact. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Emily Dickinson rethought the nature of human contact, turning away from transcendentalist approaches and towards sympathetic ones. Their second and third works portray social masks as insufficient, not deceptive, and thus human contact requires not violent striking through the mask but benevolent skepticism towards persons. They imagine that people feel real in a real world with real others when they care for others for the other's sake and when they make caring relationships the cornerstone of their own being. Grounded in philosophies of sympathy - including Adam Smith and J. G. Herder - and relational psychology - Winnicott and Benjamin - Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature shows that antebellum literature rejects individualist definitions of the human and locates the antidote to human disconnection in sympathy.

#106

Counterfeit Culture

Truth and Authenticity in the American Prose Epic since 1960

2019

Counterfeit Culture explores the possibility of writing epic in an age of alternative facts. Examining six attempts to forge an American prose epic since 1960, this study goes on to trace a national tradition of inauthenticity, stretching back across four centuries. In works by authors such as Pynchon, Gaddis and Burroughs, the contemporary turn away from truth and authenticity can be seen as a return to an established line of literary tricksters and confidence men, with tropes of fraud and artifice running deep in the American grain. Combining archival work with historically-inflected analysis of literary narrative, this book ranges through questions of identity, technology, history, and music in its engagement. From Marguerite Young's inquiry into psychological disintegration to William T. Vollmann's ongoing cycle of false histories, the study introduces a new reading of the American epic.

#107

Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels

2019

Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels explores the prolific careers of four exemplary novelists - E. D. E. N. Southworth, Ann Stephens, Mary Jane Holmes, and Laura Jean Libbey. These commercially successful writers helped to shape the popular tradition of serial magazine fiction by drawing on readers' tastes along with their cultural concerns. Their astonishing productivity led magazine editors and publishers to return to them repeatedly for more serials to be turned into even more novels, even as they reprinted these fictions under new titles. Dale M. Bauer analyzes how serials deployed the repetition of plots and the traumas representing the sources of women's anxieties and pain. Arguing that these novels provided temporary resolutions to the social, economic, and psychological tensions that readers faced, Bauer explains how this otherwise forgotten archive of fiction now offers an extraordinarily expanded range of women's literary effort from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.

Authors

Tim Armstrong

Author · 3 books

NOTE: There is more than one author with this name. For the Gaelic-language author Tim Currie Armstrong, see Tim Armstrong.

Gavin Jones is Professor of English at Stanford University, where he currently serves as department Chair. A former Junior Fellow in Harvard University's Society of Fellows, Jones is the author of Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (1999) and American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in US Literature, 1840-1945 (2007). He has published numerous articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature in journals such as American Literary History, African American Review and New England Quarterly.

1754-1827

Marianne Noble is Associate Professor of Literature at American University, where she teaches nineteenth-century American literature and introductory courses in literary theory and creative writing. She has published widely in numerous journals.

John Milton Hay (October 8, 1838 – July 1, 1905) was an American statesman & official, lawyer and writer; his career in government stretched over almost half a century. Beginning as a private secretary and assistant to Abraham Lincoln, Hay's highest office was United States Secretary of State under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Hay was also an author and biographer, and wrote poetry and other literature throughout much of his life. John Hay was born on October 8, 1838, in Salem, Indiana, but spent most of his youth in Warsaw, Illinois. The third son of Dr. Charles Hay and Helen Leonard, Hay moved to Illinois when he was 13 years old to study at an academy in Pittsfield. There, he met John Nicolay, with whom he would later work as a private secretary for President Abraham Lincoln. A year later, in 1852, Hay left for Springfield College. After completing his early education, he was accepted into Brown University, his grandfather's alma mater. While studying at Brown, Hay developed a strong interest in literature, particularly poetry. He became actively involved in Providence’s literary community, which included Nora Perry and Sarah Helen Whitman, who had been engaged to Edgar Allan Poe. Upon graduating from Brown, Hay was named "class poet," but he left school before receiving his diploma at the university's official commencement ceremony. After graduation, he returned home to Warsaw, Illinois, where he studied law and worked for his uncle, Milton Hay's law office. The law office where Hay worked was next door to Abraham Lincoln's law office and, as a result of their close proximity, Hay and the future president became acquaintances. Lincoln was elected president of the United States in 1861 and he chose John Nicolay, Hay's childhood classmate, as his secretary. Nicolay subsequently recommended Hay for the position of private secretary to the president. Hay was offered the position, and served in the Lincoln White House from 1861 to 1865. He went on to serve as the U.S. secretary of state for both William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Arguably his greatest influences were negotiating the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty and promoting an "Open Door" policy in China. Hay continued to write throughout his life. His literary work includes Pike County Ballads and Other Pieces, a book of poems; the novel The Bread-Winners; and Abraham Lincoln: A History, a historical non-fiction book co-written by John Nicolay. Hay died on July 1, 1905, in Newbury, New Hampshire.

Robert S. Levine (Ph.D. Stanford University 1981) is Distinguished University Professor of English and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland, College Park. Levine is the General Editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature and is a member of the editorial boards of American Literary History, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, and J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.