American Literature

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Damned Agitator

By Michael Gold
Edited by Patrick Chura
Introduction by Patrick Chura
Subjects: Literature

The most comprehensive collection of writings by an important twentieth-century radical writer.

Doubly Erased

A wide-ranging overview of contemporary literary works by LGBTQ Appalachians with a focus on LGBTQ themes and characters.

The Bravo

A novel of early eighteenth-century Venice that Cooper called "in spirit, the most American book I ever wrote."

The Sea Lions

An exciting adventure tale of sealers caught in the Antarctic ice in the early nineteenth century and forced to winter over in extreme conditions.

Home as Found

A novel of manners set in the drawing rooms, ballrooms, and Wall Street offices in 1830s New York, dramatizing conflicts that we are still grappling with nearly two hundred years later.

A Black Forest Walden

Compares life today in the German Black Forest with Thoreau's experiences at Walden Pond.

Creative Transformations

Explores the role of travel and translation in Brazilian literature and culture from the 1870s to the present.

The Blossom Which We Are

Charts the vicissitudes of a distinctly modern and peculiarly human vulnerability—our intimate dependence on the fragile, time-bound cultural framework that we inhabit—in the history of the realist novel.

Knowing It When You See It

Lively analysis of how Henry James's fiction anticipates later filmmakers' concerns with what we can see and what we can know.

Enduring Critical Poses

A celebration of Anishinaabe intellectual tradition.

Reconciling Nature

Reveals how classic American novels embodied the tensions embedded in American views of the natural world from the Centennial until the end of the Second World War.

The State of Race

An innovative comparative study of the role of racial stereotypes in expressing state power under globalization.

Emerson in Iran

By Roger Sedarat
Subjects: Literature

Examines the impact of Persian poetry in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Animating Black and Brown Liberation

Offers a new framework for reading American literatures that critically links African American and Latinx traditions and struggles for liberation.

Multicultural Poetics

Argues that multiculturalism and hybridity are key components of the nation’s poetry and its culture.

Bootlegger of the Soul

A celebration of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist who put Albany on the world’s literary map.

The Love of Ruins

Explores issues related to race and religion in Lovecraft criticism.

Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka, and Scientific Imagination

Explores the science and creative process behind Poe’s cosmological treatise.

Toward a Non-humanist Humanism

Assesses the limits and possibilities of humanism for engaging with issues of pressing political and cultural concern.

Letters to a Best Friend

A lively and intimate selection of letters on life, literature, and art from one of America’s finest prose stylists.

William Cullen Bryant

A biography of one of nineteenth-century America’s foremost poets and public intellectuals.

Inhabiting La Patria

Examines the work of prolific Dominican American writer Julia Alvarez.

Fifties Ethnicities

Demonstrates how written and visual representations worked to construct definitions of ethnicity in midcentury America.

Mary Barnard, American Imagist

Uncovers a new chapter in the story of American modernist poetry.

Guerrillas in the Industrial Jungle

By Ursula McTaggart
Subjects: History

Examines the metaphors of the “primitive” and the “industrial” in the rhetoric and imagery of anticapitalist American radical and revolutionary movements.

Environmental Evasion

By Lloyd Willis
Subjects: Literature

Brings ecocriticism into conversation with critical American studies approaches to literary canon formation.

Blood at the Root

Examines the relationship of lynching to black and white citizenship in the 19th and 20th century U. S. through a focus on historical, visual, cultural, and literary texts.

Something Akin to Freedom

Examines why African American women would choose conditions of bondage over individual freedom.

The Passing of Postmodernism

Examines the increasingly prevalent assumption that postmodernism is over and that literature and film are once again engaging sincerely with issues of ethics and politics.

Making Poems

Contemporary poets offer behind-the-scenes perspectives on the poetic process.

The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature

Looks at Buddhist influences in American literature and how literature has shaped the reception of Buddhism in North America.

Belonging Too Well

Shows how Ozick’s characters attempt to mediate a complex Jewish identity, one that bridges the differences between traditional Judaism and secular American culture.

The Italian Actress

A has-been American filmmaker encounters love, cruelty, and death in Italy.

Women Writers of the Provincetown Players

Edited by Judith E. Barlow
Subjects: Literature
Series: Excelsior Editions

Thirteen short plays by women that were originally produced by the Provincetown Players.

The Gita within Walden

Looks at the connections between Thoreau’s Walden and the work that influenced it, the Bhagavad-Gita.

Herman Melville and the American Calling

Argues that Herman Melville’s later work anticipates the resurgence of an American exceptionalist ethos underpinning the U. S.-led global “war on terror. ”

Locating Race

Pinpoints the limits of many current globalization theories in challenging racial oppression, and argues instead for local and situated strategies for resisting racism and imperialism.

New Morning

Essays and poems explore the contemporary relevance of Emerson’s work and thought.

The American Protest Essay and National Belonging

By Brian Norman
Subjects: Literature

Explores the role of the literary protest essay in addressing social divisions in the United States.

Musing the Mosaic

Examines Sukenick's role in reshaping the American literary tradition.

The Visionary Moment

Explores and critiques the metaphysics and ideology of the visionary moment as a convention in twentieth-century American fiction, from the standpoint of postmodernism.

Rewriting

Examines the tendency of post-World War II writers to rewrite earlier narratives by Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, and others.

Living Root

In this literary memoir, poet and essayist Michael Heller interweaves family and personal history with reflections on language, poetry, religion, and memory itself.

Not One of Them in Place

Explores the ways in which Jewish American poetry engages persistent questions of modern Jewish identity.

Beautiful Chaos

Explores the way chaos theory is incorporated in the work of such writers as Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Don DeLillo, and Michael Crichton.

Neglected Aspects of American Poetry

Challenging the neglected aspects of American poetry.

Structures of Power

Explores the many faces of power as revealed in twentieth-century Spanish-American fiction.

Death in a Delphi Seminar

In this detective novel set in a small, intense seminar, eight students study what their professor regards as the central mystery of human nature: the uniqueness of the individual. One morning a woman ...

Revelations of Self

Edited by Lois J. Fowler & David H. Fowler
Subjects: Literature

These autobiographies illustrate the emergence of American women from their traditional position of dependence and legal and social inequality. Here are five women of the nineteenth and early twentieth ...

The Woman in the Mountain

By Kate H. Winter
Subjects: Literature

Examines the works of seven Adirondack writers.