Books in the Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture series

In this volume, seven renowned critics present different views of Wallace Stevens' place in the evolution of Modernist poetry. The essays offer a fresh scrutiny of the poet's work and influence, re-examining the critical consensus that has developed since Stevens first gained the attention of critics in the fifties.

Approaching post-World War II poetry from a postmodern critical perspective, this study challenges the prevailing assumption that experimental forms signify political opposition while traditional forms are politically conservative.

Melville's City argues that Melville's relationship to the city was considerably more complex than has generally been believed. By placing him in the historical and cultural context of nineteenth-century New York, Kelley presents a Melville who borrowed from the colourful cultural variety of the city while at the same time investigating its darker and more dangerous social aspects.

Stephen Fredman asserts in his work that American poetry is groundless - that each generation of American poets faces the problem of identity anew and has to discover fresh meaning for itself.

This book is a meditation on the theme of provincialism in American literature. With careful attention to the historical context, it identifies in the expressions of pre-Civil War writers certain qualities of self-doubt and defensiveness, certain perceptions of displacement and decline, so characteristic as to amount to a defining trait of American literature.

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.

This book suggests an interpretation of the characteristic qualities of Scottish and American literatures. Considering the self-consciously different stance which sets them apart from English literature, the author develops the constituents of the 'puritan-provincial vision': a particular way of looking at life and man's relationship to what lies beyond himself.

Novel Arguments, first published in 1995, argues that innovative fiction extends our ways of thinking about the world, rejecting the critical consensus that, under the rubrics of postmodernism and metafiction, homogenises this fiction as autonomous and self-absorbed.

Charles Altieri's book sets modernist American poetry in a precise cultural context by analysing how major poets reacted to the challenge posed by modernist painting's radical critique of traditional representational models for art.

A whole range of major American writers have focused on images of the household, of domestic virtue, and the feminine or feminized hero. This important 1990 book examines the persistence and flexibility of such themes in the work of a tradition of classic writers.

Elisa New presents a major revision of the accepted account of Emerson as the source of the American poetic tradition. New challenges the view that Emerson not only overthrew New England religious orthodoxy but founded a poetic tradition that fundamentally renounced that orthodoxy in favour of a secular, Romantic approach.

Griffin analyses the important but neglected body of anti-Catholic fiction written between the 1830s and the turn of the century in both Britain and America. This book will be essential reading for scholars working on British Victorian literature as well as nineteenth-century American literature.

Reimagining Thoreau synthesises the interests of the intellectual and psychological biographer and the literary critic in a reconsideration of Thoreau's career from his graduation from Harvard in 1837 to his death in 1862.

The Catholic Side of Henry James reveals the profound Catholic imagery in the work of Henry James. Edwin Fussell questions conventional critical assumptions about James' secularity and shows that James' career began with narratives of Catholic conversion and ended with his masterpiece of Catholic eccentricity and alienation, The Golden Bowl.

When Ernest Hemingway committed suicide in 1961 he left four unfinished works. In opposition to traditional interpretations of these works, Burwell uncovers substantial literary and biographical evidence which finds that Hemingway designed three of them as a trilogy - 'his own Portrait of the Artist'.

The essays assembled here vary in approach, but they share a commitment to the discipline of history and an awareness that history can function as critique as well as celebration. Several contributors take issue with Eliot's self-presentation and include documents Eliot chose not to emphasise.

In this provocative and original study, Robert E. Abrams argues that in mid-nineteenth-century American writing, new concepts of space and landscape emerge. Abrams explores the underlying frailty of a sense of place in American literature of this period.

Examining the literary history of racial and national identity in nineteenth-century America, Kerkering tells the story of how poetry helped define America as a nation before helping to define America into distinct racial categories. Through formal literary effects, national and racial identities become related elements of a single literary history.

Theo Davis offers a fresh account of the emergence of a national literature in the United States. She analyses how American authors' prose seeks to create an art of abstract experience and reconsiders the place of form in literary studies today.

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.

Birnbaum examines representations of interracial work bonds in fiction and literary correspondence by black and white authors and artists - including Elizabeth Keckley, W. D. Howells, Grace King, Kate Chopin, Langston Hughes, Amy Spingarn and Carl Van Vechten. This study will be of interest to scholars in both literary and cultural studies.

Elizabeth Hewitt uncovers the centrality of letter-writing to antebellum American literature. She argues that many canonical American authors, including Jefferson, Emerson, Melville, Dickinson and Whitman, turned to the epistolary form as an idealised genre with which to consider the challenges of American democracy before the Civil War.

Maurice Lee, in this 2005 book, demonstrates how the slavery crisis became a crisis of philosophy. Poe, Stowe, Douglass, Melville, and Emerson tried - and failed - to find rational solutions to the slavery conflict. Drawing on antebellum moral philosophy, political theory, and metaphysics, Lee brings a different perspective to the literature of slavery.

Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature provides a wide-ranging examination of politics in the literature of the African diaspora. Yogita Goyal identifies the creative tensions between romance and realism, drawing on a remarkably diverse group of twentieth-century authors, including Du Bois, Achebe and Phillips.

Dorri Beam presents an important contribution to nineteenth-century fiction by examining writing which was characterized by its florid and sensuous style. This 2010 book provides both close readings of a number of familiar and unfamiliar works and an overarching account of the importance of this form of writing.

Moving boldly between literary analysis and political theory, contemporary and antebellum US culture, in this 2006 book Arthur Riss invites readers to rethink prevailing accounts of the relationship between slavery, liberalism, and literary representation. This revisionary argument promises to be unsettling for literary critics, political philosophers, and historians of US slavery.

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.

The years after World War Two have seen a widespread fascination with the free market, going beyond individualism in expressing a desire for an entirely economic world. In this book, Michael W. Clune considers this fascination evident within postwar literature.

This book examines how literature represents different kinds of spaces, from the single-family home to the globe. It focuses on how nineteenth-century authors drew on literary tools including rhetoric, setting, and point of view to mediate between individuals and different spaces, and re-examines how local spaces were incorporated into global networks.

Professor Miller examines prominent writers and painters of nineteenth-century America who explored the scenery of swamps, jungles, and other wastelands. Through this examination, Miller discusses the changing social realities around the Civil War and the deep-seated personal pressures that the urbanised and technological environment had on these artists.