Books in the Oxford Studies in American Literary History series

Playing in the White brings postwar white life novels back into conversations about the nature of African American literature and the unique expectations imposed upon black texts.

The book investigates the relations between American literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the sciences of the brain and the nervous system, showing how literary authors investigated, used, and challenged this emerging neurophysiology.

This book explores how Jewish American writers like Sholem Asch, Jacob Glatstein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anna Margolin, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley think of themselves as world writers, and the successes and failures that come with this role.

Using the U.S. as a case study, Literature in the Making examines the public life of literature between the late eighteenth century and the early twentieth century.

This book studies literary regionalism and it shows that one of the ways we imagine the world is through writing and reading about particular places. It explores how writers are shaped by particular places and how their stories shape our understanding of localities and the globe.

Focusing on the Washington political novel of the Gilded Age, circa 1869 to 1900, the volume examines the relationship between literature, politics, and democracy, and considers literature's role in defining and exploring the emotional contours of the political landscape in the nineteenth century.

This volume explores the role of the Pacific Ocean in the American Revolution and its influence on early American culture and literature. It studies the transoceanic connections between the Pacific and Atlantic and the political and literary developments that accompanied the period's explosion in global maritime travel.

Surveyors of Customs explores literature's insights into how America-its soft capitalism, its "democratized" inequality, its Americanization of power-"ticks." Joel Pfister argues that writers from Benjamin Franklin to Louise Erdrich can be read as critical "surveyors" of customs, culture, hegemony, capitalism's emotional logic, and much else.

Modern Sentimentalism discusses how the iconic modern woman as presented in interwar American literature. It reveals how this literary figure carries the weight of sentiment and how the question of feminine feeling is central to modernism's preoccupations and styles.

Examines the works of a diverse range of realist poets to redefine the significance of poetry to the genre of realism during the postbellum period in American literature.

Forms of Dictatorship examines novels that depict the historical reality of dictatorship and exploit dictatorship as a literary trope.

The Civil War Dead and American Modernity offers a fundamental rethinking of the cultural importance of the American Civil War dead.

White Writers, Race Matters explores the popular tradition of white-authored novels about racism in America. What explains their success, and what are their limitations? This study examines these questions through rich case studies combining biography, historical analysis, close reading, and literary theory to map the significance of this genre and its ongoing relevance.

Surveyors of Customs explores literature's insights into how America-its soft capitalism, its "democratized" inequality, its Americanization of power-"ticks." Joel Pfister argues that writers from Benjamin Franklin to Louise Erdrich can be read as critical "surveyors" of customs, culture, hegemony, capitalism's emotional logic, and much else.

Speculative Fictions places Alexander Hamilton at the center of American literary history to consider the important intersections between economics and literature.

Propaganda 1776 reframes the culture of the U.S. Revolution and early Republic, revealing it to be rooted in a vast network of propaganda.

Drawing on novels, film, and photographs, Living Oil offers a literary and cultural history of modern environmentalism and petroleum in America.

Combining nuanced literary interpretations with significant legal cases, Family Money reveals a shared preoccupation with the financial quandaries emerging from interracial sexuality in nineteenth-century America. At stake, Clymer shows, were the very notions of family and the long-term distribution of wealth in the United States.

Writing the Rebellion presents a cultural history of loyalist writing in early America, dissolving the old legend that loyalists were more British than American, and patriots the embodiment of a new sensibility.

Andy Doolen's monograph reorients literary history, turning to the neglected Western writings that shaped the distinctive process of U.S. expansionism in the years following the Louisiana Purchase

Unscripted America reconstructs an archive of indigenous language texts in order to present a new and wholly unique account of their impact on philosophy and US literary culture.

The Moral Economies of American Authorship argues that the moral character of authors became a kind of literary property within mid-nineteenth-century America's expanding print marketplace, shaping the construction, promotion, and reception of texts as well as of literary reputations.

In this fascinating cultural history, Mary Chapman demonstrates the importance of the aesthetically innovative print culture produced by US suffragists in the two decades leading up to the passage of the 19th Amendment, seven decades after women's rights activists first met at Seneca Falls.

A sweeping study that spans two continents and over three hundred years of literary history, Antipodean America identifies the surprising affinites between Australian and American literature.

This book rethinks sentimentalism by tracing it through US writings set elsewhere in the Americas.

Violentologies explores how different forms of violence shape identity and political vision in both familiar and unexpected ways using Latina/o writers and performers as case-studies.

Taking up four different political themes-human rights, the relation between public and private space, racial justice, and environmentalism-After Critique suggests that the ontological forms emerging in contemporary U.S. fiction articulate a version of politics that might successfully evade neoliberal appropriation.

Anxieties of Experience offers a new interpretation of US and Latin American literature. Rereading a range of canonical works from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass to Roberto Bolano's 2666, it traces the development and interaction of two distinct literary strains in the Americas: the "US literature of experience" and the "Latin American literature of the reader."