Books in the New Americanists series

Argues that the meaning of citizenship in the United States during the nineteenth century was bound to - and even dependent on - death. Deploying an impressive range of literary and cultural texts, this title interrogates an American public sphere that fetishised death as a crucial point of political identification.

Examines the interdependence of literary and mass culture at a crucial moment in United States history. This book argues that these figures were manipulated, translated, and adopted not only by authors such as Hawthorne, Thoreau, Cooper, and Melville but also by African American and Native American writers like William Wells Brown and Okah Tubbee.

The first study to focus on how popular representations of the forced relocation and internment of nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II affected the formation of Cold War culture

Focuses on a series of modern writers who were acutely sensitive to the American web of ideology and utopic vision in order to argue that a pervasive middle-class imaginary is the key to the enigma of class in America.

With anecdote-peppered discussions ranging from literary texts and movies to the future of higher education and the efficacy of unions, this book entertains as it offers a 21st century account of how and why Americanists at home and abroad do what they do.

Bringing two voices into the discussion - Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon - to examine the different ways in which their writings embody, engage, and critique the official narratives generated by US liberal ideology, the author revises important ideas in the debate over individualism and the political theory of liberalism.

Offers fresh ways of thinking about whiteness by exploring its surprisingly ambivalent partnership with heterosexuality. This book examines white-supremacist American texts written and produced between 1852 and 1915 - literary romances, dime novels, religious and scientific tracts, film - and exposes the perverse infrastructure of whiteness.

Focuses on the role of African American folk music in Renaissance aesthetic and political debates about racial performance, social memory, and national identity. This book elucidates how spirituals, African American concert music, the blues, and jazz became symbolic sites of social memory and anticipation in the era of the Harlem Renaissance.

Examines the formation of postmodern sensibilities and their relationship to varieties of paranoia that have been seen as widespread. This book argues that paranoia on the broadly cultural level is essentially a narrative process in which history and postmodern identity are negotiated simultaneously.

Presents the study of stand-up comedy as a form of art. This title appreciates and analyses the specific practice of stand-up itself, moving beyond theories of the joke, of the comic, and of comedy in general to read stand-up through the lens of literary and cultural theory.

Explores the creation of the Pacific Rim in the American imagination and how the concept has been adapted and resisted in Hawai'i, the Pacific Islands, New Zealand, and Australia. This title draws on theories of postmodernism, transnationality, and post-Marxist geography to contribute to the discussion of what constitutes 'global' and 'local'.

Examines constructions of racial identity through the exploration of passing narratives including forties jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow's memoir Really the Blues

Suitable for students and scholars of American culture, African-American literature, literary theory, gender studies, queer theory, and cultural studies, this book presents an exploration of death's relation to subjectivity in twentieth-century American literature and culture.

During the 1992 Democratic Convention and again while delivering Harvard University's commencement address two years later, Vice President Al Gore shared with his audience a story that showed the effect of sentiment in his life.

Demonstrates that Asian American male and female writers engage different strategies in the struggle to adapt, reflecting their particular, gender-based relationships to immigration, work, and cultural representation.

Explores interactions between novels and advertising in the construction of subjectivity in the early part of the twentieth century.

Examines three authors who have influenced the formation of racial identities in the United States: Henry James, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison. Using their work, this title illuminates the significance that representational practice has had in the process of racial construction.

Presents the Harlem Renaissance, exploring early challenges to the idea that race is a static category. Drawing on vernacular theories of African American literature from figures such as Henry Louis Gates Jr and Houston Baker, this book looks at the work of four fiction writers: James Johnson, Nella Larsen, George Schuyler, and Jean Toomer.

Examines the connection between American pragmatism and literary modernism by focusing on the concept of transition as a theme common to both movements. This book illuminates the poetic imperatives of pragmatism by tracing the ways in which Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens capture the moment of transition.

Offers a revaluation of American literature and culture at the dawn of the twentieth century, and provides a context for understanding debates about America's relation to the rest of the world. Ranging over history, politics, philosophy, and literature, this work contributes to debates about utopian thought, globalisation, and American literature.

Published in 1994, this is a paperback edition edition of a study of the life and writings of literary pioneer, Lydia Maria Child. Her writing made and impact on American life as she addressed the issues of her time: slavery, women's rights, treatm

Most would agree that American culture in the 1980s differed dramatically from that of the 1960s. Yet the 1970s is still thought of as a cultural wasteland. This text debunks this notion by examining a wide range of political and cultural phenomena.

Explores the relationship between gender, race, and nation by tracing developing ideals of citizenship in the United States from the Revolutionary War through the 1850s. This book shows how this ideal has simultaneously privileged and oppressed white men. It is suitable for those studying early national culture, and race and gender issues.

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.

Focusing on the commonalties revealed in their shared language and colonial history, the author examines the work of six writers who, while artistically distinct and geographically scattered, share complex sensibilities regarding their own relationship to France and the French language.

Offers a major reassessment of the work of Herman Melville, a definitive history of the post-Enlightenment discourse on cannibalism, and a provocative contribution to postcolonial theory. This title focuses on the representations of cannibalism in three of Melville's key texts-Typee, Moby-Dick, and "Benito Cereno."

Explores how photographs have been and are used to construct versions of history and examines how photographic representations of otherness often tell stories about the self. This book exhibits the work of American women; tells their absorbing stories; and discusses representations of North American Indians, African Americans,and the migrant poor.

Unlike studies of 19th-century culture that perpetuate a dichotomy of a public, male world set against a private, female world, this book shows the sometimes contradictory cultural planes on which struggles for authority unfolded in antebellum America. It also revises the terms of debate on 19th-century literature, history, and gender studies.

A study of the pragmatism of Emerson, James, and Peirce and its relevance for the neopragmatism of thinkers like Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, and Cornel West. In offering neopragmatism, a theory of the mind taken from Emerson, James, and Peirce, this book suggests that the neopragmatists' arguments can be sharpened across a variety of disciplines.

In its demonstration of how the US has been shaped by its dual status as an imperial and a postcolonial power, this study on the discourse of natural rights and national identity in the pre-Civil War United States may interest students and scholars of American studies, African American studies, gender studies, and American history and literature.