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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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118 results in Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture

Page 6 of 6

Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West
  • William R. Handley
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    15 August 2002
  • In Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West, William R. Handley examines literary interpretations of the Western American past. Handley argues that although scholarship provides a narrative of western history that counters optimistic story of frontier individualism by focusing on the victims of conquest, twentieth-century American fiction tells a different story of intra-ethnic violence surrounding marriages and families. He examines works of historiography,as well as writing by Zane Grey, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner and Joan Didion among others, to argue that these works highlight white Americans' anxiety about what happens to American 'character' when domestic enemies such as Indians and Mormon polygamists, against whom the nation had defined itself in the nineteenth century, no longer threaten its homes. Handley explains that once its enemies are gone, imperialism brings violence home in retrospective narratives that allegorise national pasts and futures through intimate relationships.

New England's Crises and Cultural Memory
  • Literature, Politics, History, Religion, 1620–1860
  • John McWilliams
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    22 July 2004
  • In this magisterial study, John McWilliams traces the development of New England's influential cultural identity. Through written responses to historical crises from early New England through the pre-Civil War period, McWilliams argues that the meaning of 'New England' despite claims for its consistency was continuously reformulated. The significance of past crises was forever being reinterpreted for the purpose of meeting succeeding crises. The crises he examines include starvation, the Indian wars, the Salem witch trials, the revolution of 1775–76 and slavery. Integrating history, literature, politics and religion this is one of the most comprehensive studies of the meaning of 'New England' to appear in print. McWilliams considers a range of writing including George Bancroft's History of the United States, the political essays of Samuel Adams, the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne and the poetry of Robert Lowell. This compelling book is essential reading for historians and literary critics of New England.

From Modernism to Postmodernism
  • American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century
  • Jennifer Ashton
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    05 January 2006
  • In this overview of twentieth-century American poetry, Jennifer Ashton examines the relationship between modernist and postmodernist American poetics. Ashton moves between the iconic figures of American modernism - Stein, Williams, Pound - and developments in contemporary American poetry to show how contemporary poetics, specially the school known as language poetry, have attempted to redefine the modernist legacy. She explores the complex currents of poetic and intellectual interest that connect contemporary poets with their modernist forebears. The works of poets such as Gertrude Stein and John Ashbery are explained and analysed in detail. This major account of the key themes in twentieth-century poetry and poetics develops important ways to read both modernist and postmodernist poetry through their similarities as well as their differences. It will be of interest to all working in American literature, to modernists, and to scholars of twentieth-century poetry.

Correspondence and American Literature, 1770–1865
  • Elizabeth Hewitt
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    25 November 2004
  • Elizabeth Hewitt uncovers the centrality of letter-writing to antebellum American literature. She argues that many canonical American authors turned to the epistolary form as an idealised genre through which to consider the challenges of American democracy before the Civil War. The letter was the vital technology of social intercourse in the nineteenth century and was adopted as an exemplary genre in which authors from Crevecoeur and Adams through Jefferson, to Emerson, Melville, Dickinson and Whitman, could theorise the social and political themes that were so crucial to their respective literary projects. They interrogated the political possibilities of social intercourse through the practice and analysis of correspondence. Hewitt argues that although correspondence is generally only conceived as a biographical archive, it must instead be understood as a significant genre through which these early authors made sense of social and political relations in the nation.

Consumerism and American Girls' Literature, 1860–1940
  • Peter Stoneley
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    27 March 2003
  • Why did the figure of the girl come to dominate the American imagination from the middle of the nineteenth century into the twentieth? In Consumerism and American Girls' Literature Peter Stoneley looks at how women fictionalized for the girl reader the ways of achieving a powerful social and cultural presence. He explores why and how a scenario of 'buying into womanhood' became, between 1860 and 1940, one of the nation's central allegories, one of its favourite means of negotiating social change. From Jo March to Nancy Drew, girls' fiction operated in dynamic relation to consumerism, performing a series of otherwise awkward manoeuvres: between country and metropolis, uncouth and unspoilt, modern and anti-modern. Covering a wide range of works and authors, this book will be of interest to cultural and literary scholars alike.

Democracy, Revolution, and Monarchism in Early American Literature
  • Paul Downes
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    15 August 2002
  • Paul Downes combines literary criticism and political history in order to explore responses to the rejection of monarchism in the American revolutionary era. Downes' analysis considers the Declaration of Independence, Franklin's autobiography, Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer and the works of America's first significant literary figures including Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. He claims that the post-revolutionary American state and the new democratic citizen inherited some of the complex features of absolute monarchy, even as they were strenuously trying to assert their difference from it. In chapters that consider the revolution's mock execution of George III, the Elizabethan notion of the 'king's two bodies' and the political significance of the secret ballot, Downes points to the traces of monarchical political structures within the practices and discourses of early American democracy. This is an ambitious study of an important theme in early American culture and society.

Henry James and the Father Question
  • Andrew Taylor
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    28 February 2002
  • The intellectual relationship between Henry James and his father, who was a philosopher and theologian, proved to be an influential resource for the novelist. Andrew Taylor explores how James's writing responds to James Senior's epistemological, thematic and narrative concerns, and relocates these concerns in a more secularised and cosmopolitan cultural milieu. Taylor examines the nature of both men's engagement with autobiographical strategies, issues of gender reform, and the language of religion. He argues for a reading of Henry James that is informed by an awareness of paternal inheritance. Taylor's study reveals the complex and at times antagonistic dialogue between the elder James and his peers, particularly Emerson and Whitman, in the vanguard of mid nineteenth-century American Romanticism. Through close readings of a wide range of novels and texts, he demonstrates how this dialogue anticipates James's own theories of fiction and selfhood.

Race, Slavery, and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
  • Arthur Riss
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    17 August 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.

Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
  • Cindy Weinstein
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    09 December 2004
  • In Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Cindy Weinstein radically revises our understanding of nineteenth-century sentimental literature in the United States. She argues that these novels are far more complex than critics have suggested. Rather than confirming the power of the bourgeois family, Weinstein argues, sentimental fiction used the destruction of the biological family as an opportunity to reconfigure the family in terms of love rather than consanguinity. Their texts intervened in debates about slavery, domestic reform and other social issues of the time. Weinstein shows how canonical texts, such as Melville's Pierre and works by Stowe and Twain, can take on new meaning when read in the context of nineteenth-century sentimental fiction. Through intensive close readings of a wide range of novels, this groundbreaking study demonstrates the aesthetic and political complexities in this important and influential genre.

Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature
  • Gregg D. Crane
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    24 January 2002
  • In this broad ranging and powerful study, Gregg Crane examines the interaction between civic identity, race and justice in American law and literature. Crane recounts the efforts of literary and legal figures to bring the nation's law into line with the moral consensus that slavery and racial oppression were evil. By documenting an actual historical interaction central both to American literature and American constitutional law, Crane reveals the influence of literature on the constitutional discourse of citizenship. Covering such writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass, and a whole range of novelists, poets, philosophers, politicians, lawyers and judges, this is a remarkable book, that will revise the relationship between race and nationalism in American literature.

The Poetics of National and Racial Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
  • John D. Kerkering
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    11 December 2003
  • John D. Kerkering's study examines the literary history of racial and national identity in nineteenth-century America. Kerkering argues that writers such as DuBois, Lanier, Simms, and Scott used poetic effects to assert the distinctiveness of certain groups in a diffuse social landscape. Kerkering explores poetry's formal properties, its sound effects, as they intersect with the issues of race and nation. He shows how formal effects, ranging from meter and rhythm to alliteration and melody, provide these writers with evidence of a collective identity, whether national or racial. Through this shared reliance on formal literary effects, national and racial identities, Kerkering shows, are related elements of a single literary history. This is the story of how poetic effects helped to define national identities in Anglo-America as a step toward helping to define racial identities within the United States. This highly original study will command a wide audience of Americanists.

The American Puritan Elegy
  • A Literary and Cultural Study
  • Jeffrey A. Hammond
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    01 June 2000
  • Jeffrey Hammond's study takes an anthropological approach to the most popular form of poetry in early New England - the funeral elegy. Hammond reconstructs the historical, theological and cultural contexts of these poems to demonstrate how they responded to a specific process of mourning defined by Puritan views on death and grief. The elegies emerge, he argues not as 'poems' to be read and appreciated in a post-romantic sense, but as performative scripts that consoled readers by shaping their experience of loss in accordance with theological expectation. Read in the framework of their own time and place, the elegies shed light on the emotional dimension of Puritanism and the important role of ritual in Puritan culture. Hammond's book reassesses a body of poems whose importance on their own time has been obscured by almost total neglect in ours. It represents the first full-length study of its kind in English.

Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830–1860
  • Maurice S. Lee
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    17 June 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.

Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere
  • Anna Brickhouse
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    02 September 2004
  • This wide-ranging comparative study argues for a fundamental reassessment of the literary history of the nineteenth-century United States within the transamerican and multilingual contexts that shaped it. Drawing on an array of texts in English, French and Spanish by both canonical and neglected writers and activists, Anna Brickhouse investigates interactions between US, Latin American and Caribbean literatures. Her many examples and case studies include the Mexican genealogies of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the rewriting of Uncle Tom's Cabin by a Haitian dramatist, and a French Caribbean translation of the poetry of Phillis Wheatley. Brickhouse uncovers lines of literary influence and descent linking Philadelphia and Havana, Port-au-Prince and Boston, Paris and New Orleans. She argues for a new understanding of this most formative period of literary production in the United States as a 'transamerican renaissance', a rich era of literary border-crossing and transcontinental cultural exchange.

Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race
  • Jennie A. Kassanoff
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    16 September 2004
  • Edith Wharton feared that the 'ill-bred', foreign and poor would overwhelm what was known as the American native elite. Drawing on a range of turn-of-the-century social documents, unpublished archival material and Wharton's major novels, Jennie Kassanoff argues that a fuller appreciation of American culture and democracy becomes available through a sustained engagement with these controversial views. She pursues her theme through Wharton's spirited participation in a variety of turn-of-the-century discourses - from euthanasia and tourism to pragmatism and Native Americans - to produce a truly interdisciplinary study of this major American writer. Kassanoff locates Wharton squarely in the middle of the debates on race, class and democratic pluralism at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing on diverse cultural materials, she offers close interdisciplinary readings that will be of interest to scholars of American literature and culture.

The Origins of American Literature Studies
  • An Institutional History
  • Elizabeth Renker
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    18 October 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.

Movements in Chicano Poetry
  • Against Myths, against Margins
  • Rafael Pèrez-Torres
  • Published online:
    17 September 2009
    Print publication:
    27 January 1995
  • Interpreting specific poems by some of the best known Chicano writers, this book studies the central aesthetic and thematic concerns recent Chicano poetry addresses. Drawing on current theories of postmodernity and postcoloniality, it places a 'minority' literature within the central concerns of contemporary literary and cultural studies. The book addresses the most important issues related to Chicano identity, especially focusing on the contribution women writers and thinkers have made in articulating this identity. The study will thus be of interest to scholars specialising in feminist, cultural as well as Chicano/a studies.

Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the Nineteenth Century
  • Theo Davis
  • Published online:
    23 June 2009
    Print publication:
    22 November 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.

Page 6 of 6