Product Description: Schooling Readers investigates the fascinating intersection of two American passions: education and literature. Allison Speicher introduces readers to the common school narrative, an immensely popular genre of fiction—though now often forgotten—set in the rural one-room school in the nineteenth century...read more

Product Description: Examining the development of gay American fiction and providing an essential reading list, this literary survey covers 257 works--novels, novellas, a graphic story cycle and a narrative poem--in which gay and bisexual male characters play a major role...read more

Product Description: In The Shamrock and the Cross: Irish American Novelists Shape American Catholicism, Eileen P. Sullivan traces changes in nineteenth-century American Catholic culture through a study of Catholic popular literature. Analyzing more than thirty novels spanning the period from the 1830s to the 1870s, Sullivan elucidates the ways in which Irish immigration, which transformed the American Catholic population and its institutions, also changed what it meant to be a Catholic in America...read more

Product Description: The diminishment of rural life at the hands of urbanization, for many, defines the years between the end of the Civil War and the dawn of the twentieth century in the U.S. Traditional literary histories find this transformation clearly demarcated between rural tales-stories set in the countryside, marked by attention to regional dialect and close-knit communities-and grittier novels and short stories that reflected the harsh realities of America's growing cities...read more

Product Description: What does it mean to own something? How does a thing become mine? Liberal philosophy since John Locke has championed the salutary effects of private property but has avoided the more difficult questions of property's ontology. Chad Luck argues that antebellum American literature is obsessed with precisely these questions...read more

Product Description: Novel Nostalgias: The Aesthetics of Antagonism in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature establishes how the longing to recover a lost home or past drove some of the central conflicts of the nineteenth-century United States. Providing one of the few U...read more

Product Description: In Performatively Speaking, Debra Rosenthal draws on speech act theory to open up the current critical conversation about antebellum American fiction and culture and to explore what happens when writers use words not just to represent action but to constitute action itself...read more

Product Description: From Herman Melville’s claim that “failure is the true test of greatness” to Henry Adams’s self-identification with the “mortifying failure in [his] long education” and William Faulkner’s eagerness to be judged by his “splendid failure to do the impossible,” the rhetoric of failure has served as a master trope of modernist American literary expression...read more

Product Description: Northrop Frye and American Fiction challenges recent interpretations of American fiction as a secular pursuit that long ago abandoned religious faith and the idea of transcendent experiences. Inspired by recent philosophical thinking on post-secularism and by Northrop Frye’s theorizing on the connections between the Bible and the development of Western literature, Claude Le Fustec presents insightful readings of the presence of transcendence and biblical imagination in canonical novels by American writers ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Toni Morrison...read more

In this very readable volume, Stephanie Foote gathers a range of print sources--from novels by Edith Wharton and Henry James to gossip columns, fashion magazines, popular novels, and etiquette manuals--to ask how the realist period understood the individual experience of class. Examining the female arriviste (the parvenu of the title) in turn-of-the-century New York (where a supposedly stable elite was threatened by the nouveaux riches), Foote shows how class became more than just an economic position: it was a fundamental part of individual identity, exemplified by a shifting set of social behaviors that form the core of many nineteenth-century novels. She persuasively presents the female parvenu as a key figure in turn-of-the-century culture that embodies the volatility of social standing and the continuing project of structuring and justifying it.

Product Description: Scholars have traditionally relied upon the assumption that the nineteenth-century bildungsroman in the Goethean tradition is an intrinsically secular genre exclusive to Europe, incompatible with the literature of a democratically based culture...read more

Product Description: The Oxford History of the Novel in English is a 12-volume series presenting a comprehensive, global, and up-to-date history of English-language prose fiction and written by a large, international team of scholars. The series is concerned with novels as a whole, not just the "literary" novel, and each volume includes chapters on the processes of production, distribution, and reception, and on popular fiction and the fictional sub-genres, as well as outlining the work of major novelists, movements, traditions, and tendencies...read more

Product Description: Beginning in the 1790s, North American readers developed an appetite for the gothic novel, as imported, reprinted, and pirated editions of British and European romances flooded the market alongside homegrown works. In Gothic Subjects, Siân Silyn Roberts accounts for the sudden and considerable appeal of the gothic during this period by contending that it prepared a culturally diverse American readership to think of itself as part of a transatlantic world through which goods, people, and information could circulate...read more

Product Description: During and after the Civil War, southern women played a critical role in shaping the South's evolving collective memory by penning journals and diaries, historical accounts, memoirs, and literary interpretations of the war. While a few of these writings--most notably Mary Chesnut's diaries and Margaret Mitchell's novel, "Gone with the Wind"--have been studied in depth by numerous scholars, until now there has been no comprehensive examination of Civil War novels by southern women...read more

Reading the American Novel 1780-1865 provides valuable insights into the evolution and diversity of fictional genres produced in the United States from the late 18th century until the Civil War, and helps introductory students to interpret and understand the fiction from this popular period. Offers an overview of early fictional genres and introduces ways to interpret them today Features in depth examinations of specific novels Explores the social and historical contexts of the time to help the readers’ understanding of  the stories Explores questions of identity - about the novel, its 19th-century readers, and the emerging structure of the United States - as an important backdrop to understanding American fiction Profiles the major authors, including Louisa May Alcott, Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, alongside less familiar writers such as Fanny Fern, Caroline Kirkland, George Lippard, Catharine Sedgwick, and E. D. E. N. Southworth Selected by Choice as a 2013 Outstanding Academic Title

Product Description: Transnationalism and American Serial Fiction explores the vibrant tradition of serial fiction published in U.S. minority periodicals. Beloved by readers, these serial novels helped sustain the periodicals and communities in which they circulated...read more

Product Description: This book argues for the importance of 'cowboy masculinity,' from late nineteenth-century dime novels, to the writings of Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Roosevelt, John Steinbeck, and Owen Wister, and analyzes the democratic politics of masculinity in American literature and positions the American West as central to modernism...read more

Product Description: Desire and Disillusionment: A Guide to American Fiction Since 1890 departs from the typical academic study in that it appeals to the general reading public, undergraduate and graduate students, and literary scholars. The book’s focus on a highly relatable subject, longing and loss, its running plot summaries, and lucid presentation account for this broad appeal...read more