Books in the Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture series

Poe is frequently portrayed as an isolated idiosyncratic genius who was unwilling or unable to adapt himself to the cultural conditions of his time. In this text, Eliza Richards revises this portrayal through an exploration of his collaborations and rivalries with his female contemporaries.

Asher investigates the effect of politics on the work of T. S. Eliot, particularly the influence of French reactionary thinking. The result is a re-appraisal of Eliot's view of literary history and theory, and new readings of major poems and plays. Asher also discusses how Eliot's ideology altered the study of literature for subsequent generations of critics.

This 1993 collection of fourteen essays examine Frederick Douglass' own views on gender and class, as well as racial issues, and place his thoughts and writings in the context of debates about slavery and freedom that dominated the intellectual landscape of nineteenth-century America and well into the twentieth century.

In this study, Larson reads the literature of the pre-Civil War United States against Tocqueville's theories of equality. Imagining Equality tests these theories in the work of a broad array of authors and genres, and in doing so discovers important new themes in Stowe, Hawthorne, Douglass and Alcott.

New scientific discoveries about the nerves inspired writers like Hawthorne and Beecher Stowe to re-imagine the role of the self amidst political, social and religious tumults, including debates about slavery and the revivals of the Second Great Awakening. Murison explains the impact of neurological medicine on nineteenth-century literature and culture.

Tim Armstrong explores the cultural metaphors underpinning slavery and its legacy using a range of American art and literature, focusing especially on the writings of African-American authors like Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison.

Freeburg analyzes how Melville grapples with realities of racial difference in nineteenth-century America by examining the important role that 'blackness' plays in Melville's fiction. A valuable resource for scholars and graduate students in American literature, this text will also appeal to those working in American, African American and postcolonial studies.

By exploring case studies including the regulation of overseas colonies, immigration, Native Americans and Jim Crow violence, the book traces how trends in literature helped conventionalize the use of sovereignty for regulating racialized populations, shedding new light on the legal history of race relations in the United States.

Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture examines Pynchon's novels in their relation to 1960s counterculture. Much has been made of Pynchon's ambiguity, but in this volume, Joanna Freer offers a concrete account of Pynchon's politics, thereby emphasising commentaries within Pynchon's fiction on the Beats, the New Left, the Black Panther Party, the psychedelic movement and the women's movement.

This volume explores the way in which antebellum American writers perceived the political implications of modern philosophical skepticism. Dominic Mastroianni offers new readings of six major American authors - Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Douglass and Jacobs - and illumines their thinking about revolution, civil war, and the world's susceptibility to transformation.

At a moment when several new models of the relationship between human experience and its physical ground circulate among critical theorists and philosophers of science, Mark Noble explores poets who have long asked what our shared materiality can tell us about our prospects for new models of our material selves.

Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature explores the development of ideas about sovereignty and democracy in the early United States. It looks at Puritan sermons and poetry, founding-era political debates and representations of revolutionary and anti-slavery violence to reveal how Americans imagined the elusive possibility of a democratic sovereignty.

In The Poetry of Disturbance, David Bergman argues that post-war poetry underwent a significant if subtle shift in emphasis, moving from the modernist concern with the poem as a visual text to one that was chiefly oral in nature. The resulting change was disturbing, especially for those brought up on the principles of high modernism. This new stress on orality implied a shift in the economy of the poem, away from the austerity of language advocated by Pound and Eliot to a style that conveyed freedom, expansiveness, and an innovative directness.

Nineteenth-century American literature is often divided into two asymmetrical halves, neatly separated by the Civil War. Focusing on the later writings of Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson, this book shows how the war took shape across the nineteenth century, inflecting literary forms for decades after 1865.

This book explores the ways that many authors (such as Cooper, Bryant, Hawthorne, and Thoreau) employed postapocalyptic fantasies in their works, showing that life after the end of the world was as popular then as it is now. This book is for students and scholars of nineteenth-century American literature and cultural history.

The Poetics of Insecurity addresses a key concern of modern America - security - through close readings of American literary works. It combines literary studies with the philosophy of time and sociological theories of modernity, and provides new approaches to canonical American authors from the past two centuries.

Wild Abandon serves scholars and students of American literature, environment, and postwar history. It chronicles the environmental movement's development and interaction with identity politics in the late 20th century, focusing on psychoanalysis's influence on environmentalism, and its impact on literary representations of nature and ecology.

This study examines how black writers use visual tropes as literary devices to challenge readers' conceptions of black identity. Lena Hill charts two hundred years of African American literary history, from Phillis Wheatley to Ralph Ellison, and engages with a variety of canonical and lesser-known writers.

From Walt Whitman to the contemporary period, the long poem has been one of the more dynamic, intricate, and yet challenging literary practices of modernity. Addressing those challenges, Writing in Real Time combines systems theory, literary history, and recent debates in poetics to interpret a broad range of American long poems as emergent systems, capable of adaptation and transformation in response to environmental change. Due to these emergent properties, the long poem performs essential cultural work, offering a unique experience of history that remains valuable for our rapidly transforming digital age. Moving across a broad range of literary and theoretical texts, Writing in Real Time demonstrates that the study of emergence can enhance literary scholarship, just as literature provides unique insights into emergent properties, making this book a key resource for scholars, graduate students, and undergraduate students alike.

Practices of Surprise in American Literature After Emerson locates a paradoxical question - how does one prepare to be surprised? - at the heart of several major modernist texts. Arguing that this paradox of perception gives rise to an American literary methodology, this book dramatically reframes how practices of reading and writing evolved among modernist authors after Emerson. Whereas Walter Benjamin defines modernity as a 'series of shocks' inflicted from without, Emerson offers a countervailing optic that regards life as a 'series of surprises' unfolding from within. While Benjaminian shock elicits intimidation and defensiveness, Emersonian surprise fosters states of responsiveness and spontaneity whereby unexpected encounters become generative rather than enervating. As a study of how such states of responsiveness were cultivated by a post-Emerson tradition of writers and thinkers, this project displaces longstanding models of modernist perception defined by shock's passive duress, and proposes alternate models of reception that proceed from the active practice of surprise.

Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America examines how mass democracy was understood before public opinion could be measured by polls. It argues that fiction, in its freedom to represent what resists representation, develops the most groundbreaking theories of the democratic public. These literary accounts of democracy focus less on overt pubic action than the profound effects of everyday social encounters. This book thus departs from recent scholarship, which emphasizes the responsibilities of citizenship and the achievements of oppositional social movements. It demonstrates how novels and stories by Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Fanny Fern, Harriet Jacobs and James Fenimore Cooper attempt to understand a public organized not only by explicitly political discourse, but by informal and disorganized social networks.

Phonographs, tapes, stereo LPs, digital remix - how did these remarkable technologies impact American writing? This book explores how twentieth-century writers shaped the ways we listen in our multimedia present. Uncovering a rich new archive of materials, this book offers a resonant reading of how writers across several genres, such as John Dos Passos, Langston Hughes, William S. Burroughs, and others, navigated the intermedial spaces between texts and recordings. Numerous scholars have taken up remix - a term co-opted from DJs and sound engineers - as the defining aesthetic of twenty-first century art and literature. Others have examined modernism's debt to the phonograph. But in the gap between these moments, one finds that the reciprocal relationship between the literary arts and sonic technologies continued to evolve over the twentieth century. A mix of American literary history, sound studies, and media archaeology, this interdisciplinary study will appeal to scholars, students, and audiophiles.

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.