Table of Contents
Notes on Contributors x
Introduction 1 Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine
Part I. Forms 13
1 Poetry, Prose, and the Politics of Literary Form 15 Russ Castronovo
2 The Critical Work of American Literature 29 Joel Pfister
3 Women’s Worlds in the Nineteenth-Century US Novel 46 Shirley Samuels
4 The Secularization Narrative and Nineteenth-Century American Literature 61 Elizabeth Fenton
5 Literatures of Technology, Technologies of Literature 77 Paul Gilmore
6 Excluded Middles: Social Inequality in American Literature 93 Gavin Jones
7 Narrative Medicine, Biocultures, and the Visualization of Health and Disease 108 Kirsten Ostherr
8 Performance Anxieties: The A-Literary Companions of American Literary Studies 125 Catherine Gunther Kodat
9 Drama, Theatre, and Performance before O'Neill 141 Jeffrey H. Richards
10 Disliking It: American Poetry and American Literary Studies 158 Mary Loeffelholz
11 After the New Americanists: The Progress of Romance and the Romance of Progress in American Literary Studies 173 Jennifer L. Fleissner
12 Mass Media and Literary Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century 191 Nancy Bentley
Part II. Spaces 209
13 Cabeza de Vaca, Lope de Oviedo, and Americas Exceptionalism 211 Anna Brickhouse
14 Worlding America: The Hemispheric Text-Network 228 Susan Gillman and Kirsten Silva Gruesz
15 Worlds of Color, Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in Early American Literary History 248 Michelle Stephens
16 Transatlantic Returns 264 Elisa Tamarkin
17 American Literature in Transnational Perspective: The Case of Mark Twain 279 Shelley Fisher Fishkin
18 Southern Literary Studies 294 John T. Matthews
19 New Regionalisms: US-Caribbean Literary Relations 310 Sean X. Goudie
20 American Literature as Ecosystem: The Examples of Euclides da Cunha and Cormac McCarthy 325 George B. Handley
21 Settler States of Feeling: National Belonging and the Erasure of Native American Presence 342 Mark Rifkin
22 Tribal Nations and the Other Territories of American Indian Literary History 356 James H. Cox
23 Globalization 373 Paul Giles
Part III. Practices 387
24 Democratic Cultures and the First Century of US Literature 389 Dana D. Nelson
25 American Literature and Law 406 Brook Thomas
26 Sexuality and American Literary Studies 422 Christopher Looby
27 Exquisite Fragility: Human Being in the Aftermath of War 437 Priscilla Wald
28 The Posthuman Turn: Rewriting Species in Recent American Literature 454 Ursula K. Heise
29 Narrative and Intellectual Disability 469 Michael Bérubé
30 Reading for Asian American Literature 483 Colleen Lye
31 Untangling Genealogy’s Tangled Skeins: Alexander Crummell, James McCune Smith, and Nineteenth-Century Black Literary Traditions 500 Carla L. Peterson
32 Speculative Realism and the Postrace Aesthetic in Contemporary American Fiction 517 Ramón Saldívar
33 The New Life of the New Forms: American Literary Studies and the Digital Humanities 532 Matt Cohen
Index 549