Product Description: Putting Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in historical context, connecting it to pivotal issues like slavery, class, money, and American economic expansion, this book engages readers by presenting American history through the lens of a great novel...read more

Product Description: In the eighteenth century, literature meant learned writings; by the twentieth century, literature had come to be identified with imaginative, aesthetically significant works, and academic literary studies had developed special protocols for interpreting and valuing literary texts...read more

By examining the unique problems that "blackness" signifies in Moby-Dick, Pierre, "Benito Cereno," and "The Encantadas," Christopher Freeburg analyzes how Herman Melville grapples with the social realities of racial difference in nineteenth-century America. Where Melville's critics typically read blackness as either a metaphor for the haunting power of slavery or an allegory of moral evil, Freeburg asserts that blackness functions as the site where Melville correlates the sociopolitical challenges of transatlantic slavery and U.S. colonial expansion with philosophical concerns about mastery. By focusing on Melville's iconic interracial encounters, Freeburg reveals the important role blackness plays in Melville's portrayal of characters' arduous attempts to seize their own destiny, amass scientific knowledge, and perfect themselves. A valuable resource for scholars and graduate students in American literature, this text will also appeal to those working in American, African American, and postcolonial studies.

Product Description: Writing beyond Prophecy offers a new interpretation of the American Renaissance by drawing attention to a cluster of later, rarely studied works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. Identifying a line of writing from Emerson's Conduct of Life to Hawthorne's posthumously published Elixir of Life manuscript to Melville's Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, Martin Kevorkian demonstrates how these authors wrestled with their vocational calling...read more

Product Description: Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel was the critical event of literature and race relations in nineteenth century America. No other event had such an impact upon the slavery issue. While Mrs. Stowe wrote the weekly installments (a long serial in an antislavery paper) of Uncle Tom's Cabin she was living in genteel poverty, the harassed mother of six married to a scholarly but impractical man...read more

Product Description: This book provides new information about Emily Dickinson as a writer and new ways of situating this poet in relation to nineteenth-century literary culture, examining how we read her poetry and how she was reading the poetry of her own day...read more

Product Description: In Literary Partnerships and the Marketplace, David Dowling examines an often-overlooked aspect of the history of publishing -- relationships, of both a business and a personal nature. The book focuses on several intriguing duos of the nineteenth century and explores the economics of literary partnerships between author/publisher, student/mentor, husband/wife, and parent/child...read more

Product Description: Uncle Tom s Cabin and the Reading Revolution explores a transformation in the cultural meaning of Stowe s influential book by addressing changes in reading practices and a shift in widely shared cultural as-sumptions. These changes reshaped interpretive conventions and generated new meanings for Stowe s text in the wake of the Civil War...read more

Analyses American literature from the first half of the nineteenth century, including many lesser known works, and discusses writings of various geographical regions and both sexes

Product Description: Though one of America’s best known and loved novels, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has often been the object of fierce controversy because of its racist language and reliance on racial stereotypes. This collection of fifteen essays by prominent African American scholars and critics examines the novel’s racist elements and assesses the degree to which Twain’s ironies succeed or fail to turn those elements into a satirical attack on racism...read more