Books in the New Americanists series

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon explores how new publics were convened and contested around the riotous theatre scenes of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, from England to the Caribbean to the early United States. In the process, she develops a capacious account of performance, aesthetics, and modernity.

Considers the intricate relationship between consumption and womanhood in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Saldivar is one of the founders of border studies and one of the most respected senior scholars in American Studies. In this work he introduces the term trans-Americanity as a frame for thinking more hemispherically within a global, world-systems frame.

Offers an account of the crime story and its literary and political significance. Illuminating a previously unnoticed set of concerns at the heart of the fiction, the author contends that mid-twentieth-century American crime writers used the genre to confront and wrestle with many of the paradoxes and disappointments of New Deal liberalism.

Affirmative Reaction explores the cultural politics of heteronormative white masculine privilege in the United States.

Presents an interpretive overview of Italian American literary history. This book develops a perspective variously historical, philosophical, and cultural by which American writers of Italian descent can be read, increasing the discursive power of an ethnic literature that has received too little serious critical attention.

Reexamines Melville's monumental novel and turns the occasion into a meditation on the history and implications of canon formation. This book presents a view of the development of literary history in the United States, and a devastating critique of the genealogy of ideology in the American cultural establishment.

Challenges cliches about race and gender while looking at current debates about multiculturalism and difference while simultaneously exposing the ways in which white racial supremacy has been reconfigured since the institutional demise of segregation

Explores the leftist literary subculture of the United States and Canada during the 1930s to reconstruct the ideas of mass culture, class, and nationality that emerged as a result of the Great Depression.

Explores how author-activists in the United States, Cuba, and Mexico defined their local struggles

Argues that from the late eighteeneth century through the early twentieth, American literary and political texts used the figure of the child to represent U.S. national belonging.

Poet, novelist, journalist, and ethnographer, Americo Paredes (1915-1995) was a pioneering figure in Mexican-American border studies and a founder of Chicano studies. This book establishes Paredes' pre-eminent place in writing the contested cultural history of the American southwestern borderlands.

A cultural history of the political legitimization of youth rebellion during the Cold War era

Explores the writings of Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay and C.L.R. James and argues that these black transnationals articulated a novel conception of black identity that reconfigures the meaning of American nationality

Challenges the familiar way of reading a major strain of 19th century American literature. Rather than seeing this strain as preoccupied with a subject's inner mental life, it shows that subjects can only be understood, and understand themselves, through the production of public effects.

Examines the key role that the spatial construct (embodied by the Monroe Doctrine) of the western hemisphere played in enabling and effacing U.S. empire.

Explores the relation between nineteenth-century American interest in ancient Egypt in architecture, literature, and science, and the ways Egypt was deployed by advocates for slavery and by African American writers.

Explores the drive of whites to "individualize" Indians -- showing them how they should pursue happiness, find the meaning of life and how they should labour

Shows how a shared consciousness, or third sight, rooted in pre-colonial African cultures and disseminated in a rich oral tradition, has served diasporic communities by creating structures of feeling linking those of African descent across centuries and continents.

Challenging the standard periodization of American literary history, this title reinterprets the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman and the relationship of these two authors to each other.

Traces the emergence of the global context within which American critical identity is formed. This book argues that globalization has had a markedly negative impact on American cultural criticism, circumscribing both its material and imaginative potential, reducing much of it to absurdity. It also presents several interrelated analyses.

Recovers the history of 19th- and early-20th-century African-American reading societies.

Examining the significant influence of the Soviet Union on the work of four major African American authors - and on twentieth-century American debates about race, this book remaps black modernism, that reveals the importance of the Soviet experience in the formation of a black transnationalism.

A discussion on the ways in which representations in the U.S. have been deflected from mythic to "virtual" phenomena in literary and cultural works of the modern era.

Compares the discourses of indigeneity used by Maori and Native American peoples and proposes the concept treaty discourse to characterize the relevant form of postcolonial situation.

Offers an historical-materialist critique of practices in multiculturalism and cultural studies. Rejecting contemporary theories of inclusion as affirmations of the capitalist status quo, this book envisions a future of politically equal and economically empowered citizens through the democratisation of power and the socialisation of property.

Presents the study of the serial novel The Whole Family. This title uses this project it as a lens through which to examine turn-of-the-century American publishing, gender relations, narrative forms, and ideas of the individual, the family, and the public and intimate spheres.