Bücher der Reihe Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture

Elizabeth Hewitt uncovers the centrality of letter-writing to antebellum American literature. She argues that many canonical American authors, including Jefferson, Emerson, Melville, Dickinson and Whitman, turned to the epistolary form as an idealised genre with which to consider the challenges of American democracy before the Civil War.

Birnbaum examines representations of interracial work bonds in fiction and literary correspondence by black and white authors and artists - including Elizabeth Keckley, W. D. Howells, Grace King, Kate Chopin, Langston Hughes, Amy Spingarn and Carl Van Vechten. This study will be of interest to scholars in both literary and cultural studies.

Grusin investigates how the establishment of national parks participated in the production of American national identity after the Civil War. He explores the origins of America's three major parks - Yosemite, Yellowstone and Grand Canyon - in relation to other forms of landscape representation in the late nineteenth century.

This book is a meditation on the theme of provincialism in American literature. With careful attention to the historical context, it identifies in the expressions of pre-Civil War writers certain qualities of self-doubt and defensiveness, certain perceptions of displacement and decline, so characteristic as to amount to a defining trait of American literature.

The Catholic Side of Henry James reveals the profound Catholic imagery in the work of Henry James. Edwin Fussell questions conventional critical assumptions about James' secularity and shows that James' career began with narratives of Catholic conversion and ended with his masterpiece of Catholic eccentricity and alienation, The Golden Bowl.

This book attempts an interpretation of Revolutionary American culture. It argues that the cultural identity of the United States, like its political identity, emerged from a quarrel with the Old World. Europeans believed that the Revolution had 'turned the world upside down'. American intellectuals tried to construct a republic which refuted European criticism.

Re-making it New explores the impact of modernism's polarised tradition on contemporary American poets.

Blanche H. Gelfant's book Cross-Cultural Reckonings both demonstrates and questions the applicability of postmodern cultural and literary theories to realistic texts - to fiction and autobiographies valued for their truth.

Melville's City argues that Melville's relationship to the city was considerably more complex than has generally been believed. By placing him in the historical and cultural context of nineteenth-century New York, Kelley presents a Melville who borrowed from the colourful cultural variety of the city while at the same time investigating its darker and more dangerous social aspects.

Stephen Fredman asserts in his work that American poetry is groundless - that each generation of American poets faces the problem of identity anew and has to discover fresh meaning for itself.

Approaching post-World War II poetry from a postmodern critical perspective, this study challenges the prevailing assumption that experimental forms signify political opposition while traditional forms are politically conservative.

This is a critical and historical interpretation of 'Oriental' influences on American modernist poetry. Kern equates Fenollosa and Pound's 'discovery' of Chinese writing with the American pursuit of a natural language for poetry, what Emerson had termed the 'language of nature'.

Robert Levine has examined the American romance in a historical context. His book offers a fresh reading of the genre, establishing its importance to American culture between the founding of the republic and the Civil war.

Robinson discusses each of Emerson's major later works noting their increasing orientation to a philosophy of the 'conduct of life'. These books represent Emerson's attempt to forge a philosophy based on the centrality of domestic life, vocation and social relations and they reveal Emerson as an ethical philosopher who stressed the spiritual value of human relations, work and social action.

Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry is an inquiry into the cultural roles lyric poetry does and can play in our age. Charles Altieri first establishes a dominant mode in 'serious' American poetry by identifying current assumptions inherent in the teaching of creative writing and the awarding of prizes and contracts.

This 2003 book presents a comparative investigation of colonial prose narratives in Spanish and British America from 1542 to 1800. It discusses narratives of shipwreck, captivity and travel, as well as imperial and natural histories of the New World in the context of transformative early modern scientific ideologies.

Reimagining Thoreau synthesises the interests of the intellectual and psychological biographer and the literary critic in a reconsideration of Thoreau's career from his graduation from Harvard in 1837 to his death in 1862.

Mark Twain's preoccupation with the nature and value of the 'feminine' has long been recognized as a central feature of his writing. In this 1992 volume, Peter Stoneley goes beyond generalizations to provide a detailed analysis of this theme.

Griffin analyses the important but neglected body of anti-Catholic fiction written between the 1830s and the turn of the century in both Britain and America. This book will be essential reading for scholars working on British Victorian literature as well as nineteenth-century American literature.

Elisa New presents a major revision of the accepted account of Emerson as the source of the American poetic tradition. New challenges the view that Emerson not only overthrew New England religious orthodoxy but founded a poetic tradition that fundamentally renounced that orthodoxy in favour of a secular, Romantic approach.

A whole range of major American writers have focused on images of the household, of domestic virtue, and the feminine or feminized hero. This important 1990 book examines the persistence and flexibility of such themes in the work of a tradition of classic writers.

Charles Altieri's book sets modernist American poetry in a precise cultural context by analysing how major poets reacted to the challenge posed by modernist painting's radical critique of traditional representational models for art.

Novel Arguments, first published in 1995, argues that innovative fiction extends our ways of thinking about the world, rejecting the critical consensus that, under the rubrics of postmodernism and metafiction, homogenises this fiction as autonomous and self-absorbed.

This book suggests an interpretation of the characteristic qualities of Scottish and American literatures. Considering the self-consciously different stance which sets them apart from English literature, the author develops the constituents of the 'puritan-provincial vision': a particular way of looking at life and man's relationship to what lies beyond himself.

Dr Giles shows how Crane was directly influenced by the early work of James Joyce; how the composition of The Bridge ran parallel to the first serialisation of Finnegans Wake in Paris; and how The Bridge is the first great work of the 'Revolution of the Word' movement, predating the final published version of Finnegans Wake by nine years.

The frontier novel of white-Indian conflict formed an apt analogy for the problem of slavery. By uncovering the sentimental aspects of this genre, Ezra Tawil reveals the influence of the 'Indian novel' of the 1820s on the sentimental novel of slavery, producing a new way of reading Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Elizabeth Renker uncovers the complex historical process through which American literature overcame its image of inferiority to become an important academic field. Renker's revisionary analysis is an important contribution to the intellectual history of the United States and will be of interest to anyone studying, teaching or researching American literature.

In Henry James and Queer Modernity, first published in 2003, Eric Haralson examines far-reaching changes in gender politics and the emergence of modern male homosexuality as depicted in the writings of Henry James and three authors who were greatly influenced by him: Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway.

Fictions of Capital situates manners and writing about manners in the context of American capitalism between 1880 and 1960. The work of various economic theorists and historians is used to establish two of capitalism's deeper narratives: the plot to accumulate and expand resources and the plot to ensure reproduction of the expanded resources.

This book considers the portrayal of the American national character in the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. It examines Hawthorne's abiding concern with the development of New England from colony to province to republic, and analyses Melville's changing evocation of 'the new American', and the difficulties he faced in sustaining his heady nationalistic faith.