Böcker i Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture-serien

Through the voice of American fiction, Religion and Sexuality in American Literature examines the relations of body and spirit (religion and sexuality). Ann-Janine Morey examines novels dealing with the ministry as the medium wherein so many of the tensions of religion and sexuality are dramatised.

John McWilliams's 1990 book was the first thorough account of the many attempts to fashion an epic literature (the anxiously anticipated 'American Epic') from a wide range of potentially heroic New World subjects.

By offering a fresh look at Bishop criticism that has moved from purely formal concerns and postmodern interpretations to more recent feminist analysis, Victoria Harrison traces Elizabeth Bishop's career, dividing her work into three chronological periods of activity: her early work, her writing in Brazil, and her late retrospective verse.

Ralph Waldo Emerson's dictum 'The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language' belongs to a long tradition of writing connecting political disorders and the corruption of language that stretches back in Western culture. Thomas Gustafson examines how and why Americans renewed and developed this tradition between the ages of the Revolutionary and the Civil Wars.

Russell Goodman expands on the revisionist position developed by Stanley Cavell, that the most interesting strain of American thought proceeds from a peculiarly American kind of Romanticism.

Many critics have noticed the paradoxes and contradictions in the work of William Carlos Williams, but few have analysed them in detail. Professor Ahearn argues that Williams criticism has not gone far enough in recognizing the uses Williams saw for contradiction.

Philip Gould investigates the cultural politics of historical memory in the early American republic, specifically the historical literature of Puritanism. This 1997 study both aids the Americanist recovery of this literary period and brings together literary studies of historical fiction and historical scholarship of early Republican political culture.

Handley explains that once its enemies are gone, imperialism brings violence home in retrospective narratives that allegorise national pasts and futures through intimate relationships.

Paul Downes combines literary criticism and political history in order to explore responses to the rejection of monarchism in the American revolutionary era. He claims that the post-revolutionary American state and the new democratic citizen inherited some of the complex features of absolute monarchy, even as they were strenuously trying to assert their difference from it.

Jeffrey Hammond's study takes an anthropological approach to the most popular form of poetry in early New England - the funeral elegy. Hammond reconstructs the historical, theological and cultural contexts of these poems to demonstrate how they responded to a specific process of mourning defined by Puritan views on death and grief.

Imagined Empires investigates the interest early American culture, and especially literature, took in South American civilisations. By exploring the works of Philip Freneau, Joel Barlow, William Prescott, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman, this 1999 book sheds light on national sovereignty, identity, and the development of an American history narrative.

Walt Whitman looked to many different areas of American culture to develop a distinctively American poetry. This 1994 book investigates four of the areas he found most fertile for his own poetic development: the evolution of American dictionaries, the growth of the national sport of baseball, the decimation of American Indians, and the development of American photography.

Writing America Black, first published in 1999, examines the African American press and selected literary works by black authors. By viewing the journalist's role as historian, reporter, taste-maker, and propagandist, C. K. Doreski reveals the close bond to a larger African American literary tradition.

Partisans and Poets explores the popular poetries which interacted with American political culture during World War I. Van Wienen describes how poetry in mainstream newspapers and major-press anthologies bolstered dominant, nationalist ideologies, and demonstrates how pacifist and socialist verse mobilised minority groups contending for hegemonic power.

Gibian explores the role played by Oliver Wendell Holmes in what was known as America's 'Age of Conversation'. Combining social, intellectual, legal and literary history with textual analysis, and setting Holmes in dialogue with Emerson, Hawthorne and Melville, Gibian redefines our understanding of the writing of the American Renaissance.

The Complicity of Imagination examines the relationship between four nineteenth-century authors and the culture and politics of seventeenth-century England. This 1997 book demonstrates how literary texts participate in the artistic, political and theological tensions within American culture.

Afrocentrism and its history has long been disputed and controversial. In this important book, Wilson Moses presents a critical and nuanced view of the issues. Tracing the origins of Afrocentrism since the eighteenth century, he examines the combination of various popular mythologies, some of them mystical and sentimental, others perfectly reasonable.

Cary Wolfe analyses the dynamics and consequences of radical individualism and the sort of cultural critique it generates in Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ezra Pound.

Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre, 1935-1939 focuses on the struggles of various groups of black and white critics, audiences, and artists to define what constituted authentic, properly representative African American art in the theatre of the 1930s.

Disjunctive Poetics examines some of the most interesting and experimental contemporary writers whose work forms a counterpoint to the mainstream writing of our time.

The importance of Native American realism is traced through a study of the evolution of dramatic theory from the early 1890s through World War I and the uniquely American innovations in realistic drama between world wars.

The San Francisco Renaissance is the first overview of this major American literary movement. Michael Davidson recounts its emergence during the postwar period in the San Francisco Bay area and then as it blossomed into the literary excitements associated with the Beat movement.

This book is about the relationship of the American writer to his land and language - to the 'scene' and the 'sign', to the natural landscape and the inscriptions imposed upon it by men.

Edith Wharton feared that the 'ill-bred', foreign and poor would overwhelm an American elite. Drawing on a range of turn-of-the-century social documents, unpublished archival material and Wharton's major novels, Kassanoff argues that a fuller appreciation of American culture and democracy becomes available through an engagement with these controversial views.

Cindy Weinstein's book radically revises our understanding of nineteenth-century sentimental literature. Weinstein argues that these novels are far more complex than critics have suggested. Through intensive close readings of a wide range of novels, she demonstrates the aesthetic and political complexities in this important and influential genre.

This wide-ranging comparative study reassesses the literary history of the nineteenth-century United States within its transamerican and multilingual contexts. Anna Brickhouse uncovers lines of literary influence and descent from Latin American and Caribbean literatures that shaped this most formative period of literary production in the United States.

Esteve examines crowd representations in American literature from the antebellum era to the early twentieth century. As a central icon of political and cultural democracy, the crowd occupies a prominent place in the American literary and cultural landscape. Esteve analyses the aesthetic and political meanings of such urban crowd scenes.

Solomon examines the exchange between literature and recreation in 1930s America, arguing that writers of the period took inspiration from urban manifestations of the carnival spirit: amusement parks, vaudeville, and the dime museum display of human oddities.

This exploration of the works of a range of black and Jewish writers, critics, and academics from the 1950s to the 1980s, including Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Alice Walker, Cynthia Ozick, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin, reveals the potential of dialogue to engender misperceptions and misunderstandings.

The book traces several interrelations between value and race, and offers fresh readings of two novels by Ann Petry. While approaches to race and value are commonly examined historically or sociologically, this intriguing study provides a new critical approach that speaks to theorists of race as well as gender and queer studies.