The New Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies

Presents a wide range of new approaches to key topics such as race, disability, gender and sexuality, new materialism, and Indigeneity.

Russ Castronovo (Edited by), Robert S. Levine (Edited by)

9781009296731, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 January 2025

338 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.6 cm, 0.67 kg

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.

Introduction: taking stock and new directions Russ Castronovo and Robert S. Levine
1. Harriet Wilson's lessons: disability and nineteenth-century American literature Sari Altschuler
2. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the new Civil war literary studies Colleen Glenney Goggs
3. The Global South: a speculative exercise Katharine A. Burnett
4. 'Making it new: William Cullen Bryant's Iliad and postbellum poetics' Michael C. Cohen
5. Law, Nineteenth-Century American literary studies, and the black formalist tradition Jeannine Marie DeLombard
6. Conjuring Nineteenth-Century black environmentalism Erin Forbes
7. Transitioning queer studies in Nineteenth-Century American literature Ren Heintz
8. New materialisms and scalar collapse in Nineteenth-Century American literary studies Paul Hurh
9. Nineteenth-Century Spanish-language textbooks and US American literature Carmen E. Lamas
10. The political functions of reconstruction literature, then and now Gregory Laski
11. Echoes from the past, archives of the future: Latinx Authors and Spanish-language print culture Rodrigo Lazo and Gretchen Murphy
12. A periodical Masquerade: the History of the Book in Nineteenth-Century America, unbound Matthew Pethers
13. Tasteful sketches and tasteless ambition: rethinking the place of the sketch in Nineteenth-Century US Literature Claudia Stokes
14. Grounding Nineteenth-Century studies in indigenous studies Kathryn Walkiewicz and Kelley Wisecup
15. Cultures of data: literature and the quantitative turn Edward Whitley
16. Rethinking critical geographies: transamerican studies, the pacific, and the Nineteenth-Century United States Maria A. Windell
17. Rethinking black speculative fiction: the example of Charles Chesnutt Autumn Womack
18. The black pacific: new directions in race and transnationalism Edlie Wong
19. 'Unfeeling Stone': rethinking sentimentality at the heart of Nineteenth-Century American literary studies Xine Yao
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]