Böcker av Russ Castronovo

The New Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies takes stock of critical developments over the past twenty years, offering a fresh examination of key interpretative issues in this field. In eclectic fashion, it presents a wide range of new approaches in such areas as print and material culture, Black studies, Latinx studies, disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, postsecular studies, and Indigenous studies. This volume also maps out new directions for the future of the field. The evidence and examples discussed by the contributors are compelling, grounded in case studies of key literary texts, both familiar and understudied, that help to bring critical debate into focus and model fresh interpretive perspectives. Essays provide new readings and framings of such figures as Herman Melville, Harriet Wilson, Charles Chesnutt, Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, and Zitkála-Šá.

Explores the intersection of beauty and violence by examining university lectures and course materials on aesthetics along with riots, acts of domestic terrorism, and magic lantern exhibitions. This work suggests that the distance separating academic thinking and popular wisdom about social transformation is narrower than we generally suppose.

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.