Books by John Carlos Rowe

A look at a critical period in American Studies

Challenges the conventional critical reading of the American poetic project as an engagement with or reaction against Emersonian thought. Rowe demonstrates how ideals of individualism, intellectualism, and otherworldiness inevitably undermine any political effectiveness that a writer may seek to achieve.

Offers a vision of Henry James as a social critic whose later works can be read as rich with homo-erotic suggestiveness. Drawing from work in queer and feminist theory, this book argues that the most fruitful approach to James is one that ignores the elitist portrait of the formalist master.