Books in the Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture series

Fictions of Capital situates manners and writing about manners in the context of American capitalism between 1880 and 1960. The work of various economic theorists and historians is used to establish two of capitalism's deeper narratives: the plot to accumulate and expand resources and the plot to ensure reproduction of the expanded resources.

Liberalism and American Literature in the Clinton Era argues that a new, post-postmodern aesthetic emerges in the 1990s as a group of American writers - including Mary Gaitskill, George Saunders, Richard Powers, Karen Tei Yamashita, and others - grapples with the political triumph of free-market ideology. The book shows how these writers resist the anti-social qualities of this frantic right-wing shift while still performing its essential gesture, the personalization of otherwise irreducible social antagonisms. Thus, we see these writers reinvent political struggles as differences in values and emotions, in fictions that explore non-antagonistic social forms like families, communities and networks. Situating these formally innovative fictions in the context of the controversies that have defined this rightward shift - including debates over free trade, welfare reform, and family values - Brooks details how American writers and politicians have reinvented liberalism for the age of pro-capitalist consensus.

Faulkner's Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns offers a reading of William Faulkner by viewing his masterpieces through the lens of current critical theory. The book addresses both the power of his work and the current theoretical issues that call that power into question.

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

Paul Giles describes how secular transformations of religious ideas have helped to shape the style and substance of works by American writers, filmmakers and artists from Catholic backgrounds such as Orestes Brownson, Theodore Dreiser, Mary McCarthy, Robert Mapplethorpe, Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Altman.

In this book Warren Motley offers an original interpretation of James Fenimore Cooper's career, examining Cooper's interest in the pioneer patriachs who built new societies in the wilderness. Throughout his life Cooper explored the problem of achieving a balance between freedom and authority. Here Motley traces his preoccupation with authority.

David Halliburton's book is a richly textured study of the complete writings of Stephen Crane. Offering close readings of the works within a broad framework, Halliburton sets out to explore the imaginative world Crane created in his total oeuvre of fiction, poetry and reportage.

Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities examines the crossing of literary and social forces that forms the context for being Chicano. Heterotextuality is the medium in which xicanismo is articulated and comes to be a hybrid subject of textual difference.

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's 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.

The Courtship of Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain places the correspondence and diaries of Langdon and Twain within the larger context of Victorian American culture, showing how the couple negotiated their relationship through the mediums of literature, material culture and social and familial dynamics.

This book studies the central aesthetic and thematic concerns recent Chicano poetry addresses, and places a 'minority' literature within the central concerns of contemporary literary and cultural studies. The book addresses issues related to Chicano identity, focusing on the contribution women writers and thinkers have made in articulating this identity.

A study of relations between American radicalism and modernism in the 1930s, focusing on Wallace Stevens.

Walt Whitman looked to many different areas of American culture to develop a distinctively American poetry. This 1994 book investigates four of the areas he found most fertile for his own poetic development: the evolution of American dictionaries, the growth of the national sport of baseball, the decimation of American Indians, and the development of American photography.

This book reconsiders Flannery O'Connor, known primarily for her Catholicism. By recovering the historical circumstances in which Flannery O'Connor wrote her fiction, Jon Lance Bacon reveals an artist concerned with the cultural effects of the conflict that dominated American political discourse after 1945: the Cold War.

This study proposes interpretive strategies for nineteenth-century American women's novels. Harris contends that women in the nineteenth century read subversively, 'processing texts according to gender based imperatives'. Harris scans white, middle-class women's writing throughout the nineteenth century.

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 historical critique of Henry James in relation to nineteenth-century feminism and women's fiction. The author brings 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 book attempts an interpretation of Revolutionary American culture. It argues that the cultural identity of the United States, like its political identity, emerged from a quarrel with the Old World. Europeans believed that the Revolution had 'turned the world upside down'. American intellectuals tried to construct a republic which refuted European criticism.

This book traces the development of Marianne Moore's poetry throughout her sixty-year career as one of America's finest poets. Margaret Holley examines changes in Moore's approach to moral and artistic values, and discusses how language and form were distinctive in each of the poet's major phases.

Re-making it New explores the impact of modernism's polarised tradition on contemporary American poets.

With a writer of Faulkner's scope and subtlety even the study of his beginnings is a challenging task. How did the young man who imitated Swinburne's verse and Beardsley's drawings develop into the author of The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!?

This book is about the relationship of the American writer to his land and language - to the 'scene' and the 'sign', to the natural landscape and the inscriptions imposed upon it by men.

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 professionalisation of the writing vocation.

Breitwieser suggests that the continuity between Mather and Franklin can illuminate the larger continuity between American Puritanism and the American Enlightenment and that certain abiding questions about American identity are raised clearly for the first time in the writings of these two brilliant founders of the national literature.

The San Francisco Renaissance is the first overview of this major American literary movement. Michael Davidson recounts its emergence during the postwar period in the San Francisco Bay area and then as it blossomed into the literary excitements associated with the Beat movement.

The Cliffs of Solitude offers a comprehensive assessment of the career of one of America's most neglected major poets, Robinson Jeffers.

Blanche H. Gelfant's book Cross-Cultural Reckonings both demonstrates and questions the applicability of postmodern cultural and literary theories to realistic texts - to fiction and autobiographies valued for their truth.

Poet's Prose is the first scholarly work devoted exclusively to American prose poetry and has been recognised as a pioneering study in contemporary American poetry. Three central works of American poets' prose are discussed in detail: William Carlos Williams' Kora in Hell, Robert Creeley's Presences, and John Ashbery's Three Poems.

The American West of myth and legend has always exerted a strong hold on the popular imagination, and Reading the West, first published in 1996, examines the basis of that fascination. These critical essays by writers, independent scholars and critics on the literature of the American West showcase new ways of reading and understanding western writing.