The Global Remapping of American Literature
The Global Remapping of American Literature

Author: Paul Giles

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-06-12

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 0691180784

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This book charts how the cartographies of American literature as an institutional category have varied radically across different times and places. Arguing that American literature was consolidated as a distinctively nationalist entity only in the wake of the U.S. Civil War, Paul Giles identifies this formation as extending until the beginning of the Reagan presidency in 1981. He contrasts this with the more amorphous boundaries of American culture in the eighteenth century, and with ways in which conditions of globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century have reconfigured the parameters of the subject. In light of these fluctuating conceptions of space, Giles suggests new ways of understanding the shifting territory of American literary history. ranging from Cotton Mather to David Foster Wallace, and from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Zora Neale Hurston. Giles considers why European medievalism and Native American prehistory were crucial to classic nineteenth-century authors such as Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville. He discusses how twentieth-century technological innovations, such as air travel, affected representations of the national domain in the texts of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. And he analyzes how regional projections of the South and the Pacific Northwest helped to shape the work of writers such as William Gilmore Simms, José Martí, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Gibson. Bringing together literary analysis, political history, and cultural geography, The Global Remapping of American Literature reorients the subject for the transnational era.

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown
The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown

Author: Philip Barnard

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-05-15

Total Pages: 560

ISBN-13: 0190942266

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Over the past few decades, the writings of Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) have reclaimed a place of prominence in the American literary canon. Yet despite the explosion of teaching, research, and an ever-increasing number of doctoral dissertations, there remains no up-to-date overview of Brown's work. The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown provides a state-of-the-art survey of the life and writings of Charles Brockden Brown, a key writer of the Atlantic revolutionary age and U.S. Early Republic. The seven novels he published during his lifetime are now studied for their narrative complexity, innovations in genre, and social-political commentaries on life in early America and the revolutionary Atlantic. Through the late twentieth century, Brown was best known as an author of political romances in the gothic mode that proved to be widely influential in romantic era, and has generated large amounts of scholarship as a crucial figure in the history of the American novel. This Handbook extends its focus beyond the well-known novels to address the full range of Brown's prolific literary career. The Handbook includes original essays on all of Brown's fiction and nonfiction writings, and offers new interpretations of the contexts of his work: from the literary, social, political, and economic to the scientific, commercial, and religious. The thirty-five contributors in this volume speak in new ways about Brown's depictions of literary theory, social justice, sexuality, and property relations, as well as colonialism, slavery, Native Americans, and women's rights. Brown's perspectives on American and global history, emerging modernity, selfhood and otherness, and other topics, are explained in comprehensible and up-to-date terms. In addition to opening up new avenues of research, The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown provides the intellectual foundations needed to understand Brown's enduring impact and literary legacy.