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  3. Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture

Established in 1981 and with well over 100 titles now in print, Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture is internationally regarded as the leading forum for high-level American critical studies. Volumes in the series are written by outstanding scholars from the United States and Europe, and cover a wide range of key topics and approaches.

  • Founding Editors: Albert Gelpi, Stanford University
  • General Editors: Leonard Cassuto, Fordham University, New York
  • Advisory Boards: Alfred Bendixen, Texas A&M University, Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University, Massachusetts, Ronald Bush, St John's College, Oxford, Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University, Connecticut, Albert Gelpi, Stanford University, California, Gordon Hutner, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Walter Benn Michaels, University of Illinois, Chicago, Kenneth Warren, University of Chicago

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121 results in Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture

Page 5 of 7

Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature, 1860–1930
  • Michele Birnbaum
  • Published online:
    07 December 2009
    Print publication:
    20 November 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.

Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Intimacy
  • Victoria Harrison
  • Published online:
    07 December 2009
    Print publication:
    29 January 1993
  • By offering a fresh look at Bishop criticism that has moved from purely formal concerns and post-modern interpretations to more recent feminist analysis, Victoria Harrison traces Elizabeth Bishop's career, dividing her work into three chronological periods of activity: her early work, her writing in Brazil, and her late retrospective verse. By examining letters and notebooks, Harrison unfolds the biographical events that influenced Bishop's poetic style, addressing her treatment of such topics as family relations, history, politics, war, love, sexuality and ethnic differences. Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Intimacy delves extensively into the Bishop archives. Making wider use of Bishop's unpublished work, Harrison explores Bishop's childhood memoirs, journals, letters, Brazilian travel prose, unfinished poems and draft material. The reproduction of these archival materials - with revisions, cancelled lines, notes - shows a mind at work and a career in evolution.

Fictions of Labor
  • William Faulkner and the South's Long Revolution
  • Richard Godden
  • Published online:
    04 December 2009
    Print publication:
    28 June 1997
  • Fictions of Labor considers William Faulkner's representation of the structural paradoxes of labour dependency in the Southern economy from the antebellum period through to the New Deal. This book seeks to link stylistic aspects of Faulkner's writing to a generative social trauma which constitutes its formal core. That trauma, Godden argues, is a labour trauma, centred on the debilitating discovery by the Southern owning class of its own production by those it subordinates. Using close textual analysis and careful historical contextualization, Richard Godden produces a persuasive account of the ways in which Faulkner's work rests on deeply submerged anxieties about the legacy of violently coercive labour relations in the American South.

Covenant and Republic
  • Historical Romance and the Politics of Puritanism
  • Philip Gould
  • Published online:
    23 November 2009
    Print publication:
    13 October 1996
  • Philip Gould investigates the cultural politics of historical memory in the early American republic, specifically the historical literature of Puritanism. By situating historical writing about Puritanism in the context of the cultural forces of Republicanism and liberalism, his study reconsiders the emergence of the historical romance in the 1820s, before the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne. This 1997 book not only aids the Americanist recovery of this literary period, but also brings together literary studies of historical fiction and historical scholarship of early Republican political culture; in doing so, it offers a persuasive account of just what is at stake when one reads literature of and about the past.

Afrotopia
  • The Roots of African American Popular History
  • Wilson Jeremiah Moses
  • Published online:
    10 November 2009
    Print publication:
    13 September 1998
  • Afrocentrism and its history has long been disputed and controversial. In this important book, Wilson Moses presents a critical and nuanced view of the issues. Tracing the origins of Afrocentrism since the eighteenth century, he examines the combination of various popular mythologies, some of them mystical and sentimental, others perfectly reasonable. This is a rich history of black intellectual life and the concept of race.

Poe and the Printed Word
  • Kevin J. Hayes
  • Published online:
    09 November 2009
    Print publication:
    25 May 2000
  • Edgar Allan Poe continues to be a fascinating literary figure to students and scholars alike. Increasingly the focus of study pushes beyond the fright and amusement of his famous tales and seeks to locate the author within the culture of his time. In Poe and the Printed Word, Kevin Hayes explores the relationship between various facets of print culture and Poe's writings. His study provides a fuller picture of Poe's life and works by examining how the publishing opportunities of his time influenced his development as a writer. Hayes demonstrates how Poe employed different methods of publication 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 reappraisal of Poe's career provides an engaging account that is part biography, part literary history and part history of the book.

The Complicity of Imagination
  • The American Renaissance, Contests of Authority, and Seventeenth-Century English Culture
  • Robin Grey
  • Published online:
    05 November 2009
    Print publication:
    13 April 1997
  • The Complicity of Imagination examines the rich and complex relationship between four nineteenth-century authors and the culture and politics of seventeenth-century England. Challenging the notion that antebellum Americans were burdened by a sense of cultural inferiority in both their thought and their writing, this 1997 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.

Henry James and the 'Woman Business'
  • Alfred Habegger
  • Published online:
    04 November 2009
    Print publication:
    29 September 1989
  • This is a historical critique of Henry James in relation to nineteenth-century feminism and women's fiction. Habegger has brought to light extensive new documentation on James's tangled connections with what was thought and written about women in his time. The emphasis is equally on his life and on his fictions. This is the first book to investigate his father's bizarre lifelong struggle with free love and feminism, a struggle that played a major role in shaping James. The book also shows how seriously he distorted the truth about the cousin, Minnie Temple, whose self-assertive image inspired him; and how indebted he was to certain American women writers whom he attacked in reviews but whose plots and heroines he appropriated in his own fiction.

Voices of the Nation
  • Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture
  • Caroline Field Levander
  • Published online:
    27 October 2009
    Print publication:
    13 January 1998
  • Throughout the nineteenth century, American fiction displayed a fascination with women's speech - describing how women's voices sound, what happens when women speak and what reactions their speech produces, especially in their male listeners. Voices of the Nation argues that closer inspection of these recurring descriptions also performed political work that has had a profound - though unspecified to date - impact on American culture. Commentaries on the female voice were propounded by writers such as Henry James, William Dean Howells and Noah Webster, and these texts played a central role in attempts to define and enforce the radical social changes instituted by the emerging bourgeoisie.

The Ethnography of Manners
  • Hawthorne, James and Wharton
  • Nancy Bentley
  • Published online:
    24 October 2009
    Print publication:
    31 March 1995
  • This book examines fiction and ethnography as related forms for analysing and exhibiting social life. Focusing on the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and Edith Wharton, the study argues that novels and ethnographies collaborated to produce an unstable but powerful master discourse of 'culture', a discourse that allowed writers to turn new social energies and fears into particular kinds of authorial expertise. Crossing a range of institutions (anthropology, literature, museums, law) and texts (novels, ethnographies, travel books, social theory), this study allows fiction to take its place in a web of social practices that categorize, display and regulate what Wharton calls 'the customs of the country'.

New England Literary Culture
  • From Revolution through Renaissance
  • Lawrence Buell
  • Published online:
    15 October 2009
    Print publication:
    31 May 1986
  • This book is a study of the development of New England literature and literary institutions from the American Revolutionary era to the late nineteenth century. Professor Buell explores the foundations, growth and literary results of the professionalization of the writing vocation. He pays particular attention to the major writers - Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Stowe and Dickinson - but surveys them with a number of lesser-known authors, and explores the conventions, values and institutions which affected them all. Some of the main topics covered include the distinctive features of the Early National and Antebellum periods in New England writing; the importance of certain literary genres (poetry, oratory and religious narrative; etc.); the impact of Puritanism and its values; and the invention of acceptable conventions for portraying the New England landscape and institutions in literature.

Cross-Examinations of Law and Literature
  • Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville
  • Brook Thomas
  • Published online:
    08 October 2009
    Print publication:
    29 May 1987
  • In Cross Examinations of Law and Literature Brook Thomas uses legal thought and legal practice as a lens through which to read some of the important fictions of antebellum America. The lens reflects both ways, and we learn as much about the literature in the context of contemporary legal concerns as we do about the legal ideologies that the fiction subverts or reveals. Successive chapters deal with Cooper's Pioneers and Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables (property law and the image of the judiciary), Melville's 'Benito Cereno' and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (slavery), Melville's White Jacket, Pierre and 'Bartleby' (worker exploitation or wage slavery), The Confidence-Man (contracts), and finally, 'Billy Budd', which examines a number of issues illustrative of the triumph of legal formalism after the Civil War.

Chicano Poetics
  • Heterotexts and Hybridities
  • Alfred Arteaga
  • Published online:
    06 October 2009
    Print publication:
    28 July 1997
  • Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities examines the crossing of literary and social forces – be they linguistic, political, poetic - that forms the context for being Chicano. It reveals how a poetry of the cross can influence identity, in readings ranging from the poetry of gender and race by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to that of the fragmentary, postmodern subject of Juan Felipe Herrara. How the text of Spanish and Indian miscegenation and the story of Aztlán propagate identity is demonstrated in texts from Bernal Diaz del Castillo to Gloria Anzaldúa. The international space and the interlingual language of the borderlands are read as factors of nationalism and postcoloniality in discussion ranging from cowboy lingo to the essential Mexicanism of Octavio Paz. Heterotextuality is the medium in which xicanismo is articulated and comes to be a hybrid subject of textual difference.

Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934
  • Rachel Blau DuPlessis
  • Published online:
    05 October 2009
    Print publication:
    11 January 2001
  • In Genders, Races and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetries, Rachel Blau Duplessis shows how, through poetic language, modernist writers represented the debates and ideologies concerning New Woman, New Negro and New Jew in the early twentieth century. From the poetic text emerge such social issues of modernity as debates on suffrage, sexuality, manhood, and African-American and Jewish subjectivities. By a reading method she calls 'social philology' - a form of close reading inflected with the approaches of cultural studies - Duplessis engages with the work of such canonical poets as Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore and H. D., as well as Mina Loy, Countee Cullen, Alfred Kreymborg and Langston Hughes, writers, she claims, still marginalized by existing constructions of modernism. This book is an ambitious attempt to remap our understanding of modern poetries and poetics, and the relationship between early twentieth-century writing and society.

The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story
  • Andrew Levy
  • Published online:
    23 September 2009
    Print publication:
    24 September 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.

The Making of Racial Sentiment
  • Slavery and the Birth of The Frontier Romance
  • Ezra Tawil
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    20 July 2006
  • The frontier romance, an enormously popular genre of American fiction born in the 1820s, helped redefine 'race' for an emerging national culture. The novels of James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child, Catharine Maria Sedgwick and others described the 'races' in terms of emotional rather than physical characteristics. By doing so they produced the idea of 'racial sentiment': the notion that different races feel different things, and feel things differently. Ezra Tawil argues that the novel of white-Indian conflict provided authors and readers with an apt analogy for the problem of slavery. By uncovering the sentimental aspects of the frontier romance, Tawil redraws the lines of influence between the 'Indian novel' of the 1820s and the sentimental novel of slavery, demonstrating how Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin ought to be reconsidered in this light. This study reveals how American literature of the 1820s helped form modern ideas about racial differences.

Multilingual America
  • Language and the Making of American Literature
  • Lawrence Alan Rosenwald
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    25 September 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.

Henry James and Queer Modernity
  • Eric Haralson
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    27 March 2003
  • In Henry James and Queer Modernity, first published in 2003, Eric Haralson examines far-reaching changes in gender politics and the emergence of modern male homosexuality as depicted in the writings of Henry James and three authors who were greatly influenced by him: Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. Haralson places emphasis on American masculinity as portrayed in fiction between 1875 and 1935, but the book also treats events in England, such as the Oscar Wilde trials, that had a major effect on American literature. He traces James's engagement with sexual politics from his first novels of the 1870s to his 'major phase' at the turn of the century. The second section of this study measures James's extraordinary impact on Cather's representation of 'queer' characters, Stein's theories of writing and authorship as a mode of resistance to modern sexual regulation, and Hemingway's very self-constitution as a manly American author.

The Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature
  • Mary Esteve
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    27 February 2003
  • Mary Esteve provides a study of crowd representations in American literature from the antebellum era to the early twentieth century. As a central icon of political and cultural democracy, the crowd occupies a prominent place in the American literary and cultural landscape. Esteve examines a range of writing by Poe, Hawthorne, Lydia Maria Child, Du Bois, James, and Stephen Crane among others. These writers, she argues, distinguish between the aesthetics of immersion in a crowd and the mode of collectivity demanded of political-liberal subjects. In their representations of everyday crowds, ranging from streams of urban pedestrians to swarms of train travellers, from upper-class parties to lower-class revivalist meetings, such authors seize on the political problems facing a mass liberal democracy - problems such as the stipulations of citizenship, nation formation, mass immigration and the emergence of mass media. Esteve examines both the aesthetic and political meanings of such urban crowd scenes.

A Natural History of Pragmatism
  • The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein
  • Joan Richardson
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    21 December 2006
  • Joan Richardson provides a fascinating and compelling account of the emergence of the quintessential American philosophy: pragmatism. She demonstrates pragmatism's engagement with various branches of the natural sciences and traces the development of Jamesian pragmatism from the late nineteenth century through modernism, following its pointings into the present. Richardson combines strands from America's religious experience with scientific information to offer interpretations that break new ground in literary and cultural history. This book exemplifies the value of interdisciplinary approaches to producing literary criticism. In a series of highly original readings of Edwards, Emerson, William and Henry James, Stevens, and Stein, A Natural History of Pragmatism tracks the interplay of religious motive, scientific speculation, and literature in shaping an American aesthetic. Wide-ranging and bold, this groundbreaking book will be essential reading for all students and scholars of American literature.

Page 5 of 7