American Literature in Transition, 1770-1828

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

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781108617048
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	06/23/2022
Series:	Nineteenth-Century American Literature in Transition
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

William Huntting Howell is Associate Professor of English at Boston University. He is the author of Against Self-Reliance: The Arts of Dependence in the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) and the co-editor (with Megan E. Walsh) of Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends (Broadview, 2016). His essays have appeared in American Literature, The William and Mary Quarterly, Early American Studies, Common-place, and Avidly, among others.
Greta LaFleur is Associate Professor of American Studies at Yale University. Her research and teaching focus on early North American literary and cultural studies, the history of science, the history of race, the history and historiography of sexuality, and queer & trans studies. Her first book, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America, was published by The Johns Hopkins University Press in 2018. LaFleur is currently working on a new monograph, tentatively titled A Queer History of Sexual Violence (under contract with The University of Chicago Press). LaFleur's writing appears in Early American Literature, Early American Studies, American Quarterly, American Literature, and on the Los Angeles Review of Books and Public Books websites

Table of Contents

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.

Editorial Reviews

‘Howell and LaFleur’s collection should put to rest debates about whether our field suffers a theory deficit and neglects aesthetics and form. The volume’s essays adroitly handle topics as wide-ranging as using queer crip theory and decolonizing Native literary aesthetics; they also sharpen our attention to genre with a scope of themes including paranoid style and revival hymn poetics. The volume’s wealth of information, density of primary text references, and bibliographic coverage also equip anyone teaching early American literature courses with fresh pedagogical impulses and a wellspring of spin-off subjects to guide undergraduate and graduate research; as with good teaching, the essays assiduously note the greater amount of work remaining to be done on a variety of topics, texts, authors, and archives.’ Patrick Erben, Early American Literature

From the Publisher