American Literature in Transition, 1770–1828

Frames a generically and culturally diverse literary portrait of the early USA, unsettling narratives of incipient national unity.

William Huntting Howell (Edited by), Greta LaFleur (Edited by)

9781108475860, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 June 2022

350 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.6 cm, 0.689 kg

This volume presents a complex portrait of the United States of America grappling with the trials of national adolescence. Topics include (but are not limited to): the dynamics of language and power, the treachery of memory, the lived experience of racial and economic inequality, the aesthetics of Indigeneity, the radical possibilities of disability, the fluidity of gender and sexuality, the depth and culture-making power of literary genre, the history of poetics, the cult of performance, and the hidden costs of foodways. Taken together, the essays offer a vision of a vibrant, contradictory, and conflicted early US Republic resistant to consensus accountings and poised to inform new and better origin stories for the polity to come.

1. Introduction: 'Transitions' William Huntting Howell and Greta LaFleur
 I. Form and Genre: What Do We Have Here?: 2. The Law of the Form and the Form of the Law Matthew Garrett
3. The Statesman's Address Sandra Gustafson
4. Vocabularies and other Indigenous-Language Texts?Sean Harvey
5. The Genteel Novel in the Early United States Thomas Koenigs
6. The State of Our Union: Comedy in the Post-Revolutionary US Theatre Heather Nathans
 7. 'To assume her Language as my own': The Revival Hymn and the Evangelical Poetess in the Early Republic Wendy Roberts
 8. 'Little Secrets': Taste-Making and the Rise of the American Cookbook Elizabeth Hopwood
 II. Networks: 9. Modern Bigotry: The War for the Ohio, the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Settler Colonial Imagination in the Early Republic John Mac Kilgore
 10. 'This Politick Salvage': Defining an Early Native American Literary Aesthetics Drew Lopenzina
11. Logics of Exchange and the Beginnings?of US Hispanophone Literature Emily García
 12. The?Emigrationist Turn in Black Anti-Colonizationist Sentiment Kirsten Lee
 13. The Black Child, the Colonial Orphan, and Early Republican Visions of Freedom Anna Mae Duane
 III. Methods for Living: 14. The Affective Post War Michelle Sizemore
 15. Revolutionary Lives: Memoir Writing and Meaning Making during the American Revolution Michael McDonnell and Marama Whyte
 16. Literature of Poverty and Labor Lori Merish
17. Neuroqueering the?Republic: The Case of Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond Sari Altschuler
18. A Queer?Crip?Method?for Early American?Studies Don James McLaughlin.

Subject Areas: Ethnic minorities & multicultural studies [JFSL1], Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]