Books in the Oxford Studies in American Literary History series

This book examines how pain is represented in a range of literary texts and genres from the nineteenth-century United States. It considers the aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical implications of pain as the national culture of pain progressively transformed in the wake of the invention of anesthesia.

This cultural history of the American empire via ancient Rome tracks the way writers and artists have imagined Roman antiquity as an analogy that variously bolsters and critiques American imperial power.

This work demonstrates how Latina/os have been integral to US and Latin American literature and history since the nineteenth century.

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.

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."

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In The Puritan Cosmopolis, Nan Goodman demonstrates how the Puritans were far from an insular coterie that ignored the larger global community. Drawing on letters, diaries, political pamphlets, poetry, and other cultural materials, The Puritan Cosmopolis demonstrates how the Puritan population increasingly saw themselves as global citizens.

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.

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.

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.

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.