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Focusing on the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James and Edith Wharton, this book examines fiction and ethnography as related forms for analysing and exhibiting social life.

In Henry James and Queer Modernity, first published in 2003, Eric Haralson examines far-reaching changes in gender politics and the emergence of modern male homosexuality as depicted in the writings of Henry James and three authors who were greatly influenced by him: Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway.

Joan Richardson provides a fascinating and compelling account of the emergence of the quintessential American philosophy: pragmatism. She demonstrates pragmatism's engagement with various branches of the natural sciences and traces the development of Jamesian pragmatism from the late nineteenth century through modernism, following its pointings into the present. Richardson combines strands from America's religious experience with scientific information to offer interpretations that break new ground in literary and cultural history. This book exemplifies the value of interdisciplinary approaches to producing literary criticism. In a series of highly original readings of Edwards, Emerson, William and Henry James, Stevens, and Stein, A Natural History of Pragmatism tracks the interplay of religious motive, scientific speculation, and literature in shaping an American aesthetic. Wide-ranging and bold, this groundbreaking book will be essential reading for all students and scholars of American literature.

The frontier novel of white-Indian conflict formed an apt analogy for the problem of slavery. By uncovering the sentimental aspects of this genre, Ezra Tawil reveals the influence of the 'Indian novel' of the 1820s on the sentimental novel of slavery, producing a new way of reading Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Penelope's Web, published in 1991, was the first book to examine fully the brilliantly innovative prose writing of Hilda Doolittle. H. D.'s reputation as a major modernist poet has grown dramatically; but she also deserves to be known for her innovative novels and essays.

This book juxtaposes representations of labour in fictional and non-fictional texts in order to trace the intersections between aesthetic and economic discourse in nineteenth-century America.

This 1996 book argues that Henry James's work exemplifies the complex role literature plays in the formation of broadly racial, national and cultural identities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Blair delineates the complexity of his engagement with emergent cultural rituals through which American values are being forged.

This fascinating account of Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism allows the reader to understand the causes and results of Pound's ideology and actions as well as the broader implications they have for the poetry and politics of this century.

This book explores the testimonies of spiritual experience delivered by puritans in the mid-seventeenth century in order to qualify for membership of their local churches.

In this 1990 book John Limon examines the various ways American authors have approached the writing of fiction (and justified that writing) in an age increasingly dominated by science. He focuses in particular on Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism overturns many of our long-held assumptions about the social and artistic values of Protestantism. Dr Ann Kibbey offers a detailed analysis of the rhetoric of the Puritan plain style, centring her argument on the influential preacher John Cotton.

Linking classic American literature to contemporary popular culture, Sublime Enjoyment argues that the rational systems of normal social life are motivated and sustained by 'perverse' desires. Examining the ways in which this inadvertence is represented in American literature and culture, Dennis Foster shows how longings are linked to social forces.

This book focuses on the works of America's premier colonial poet, Edward Taylor (1642-1729). Professor Rowe advances a theory which unites Taylor's exegetical discipline as a preacher with his creativity as a poet. This is the first work to draw on the collection of unpublished sermons, discovered in 1977, Upon the Types of the Old Testament.

This is the first analysis of the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne and his perception of history. It examines the whole of Hawthorne's literary career and gives proper weight to the unfinished work; encouraging the reader to explore how Hawthorne presents and interprets history through his fiction.

In Walt Whitman and the American Reader, Ezra Greenspan casts Whitman as the central actor on the stage of nineteenth-century American literary culture - a culture redefining its democratic identity.

Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite reads Frost's poetry within a theoretical perspective generated, but not limited by feminist analysis, and it evaluates Frost's persistent feminising of poetic language in ways that he typically dramatises as both erotic and humiliating. The study unites biography, psychology and feminism in creating an adept and imaginative instrument of interpretation.

Discrepant Engagement addresses work by a number of authors not normally grouped under a common rubric - black writers from the United States and the Caribbean and the so-called Black Mountain poets.

Throughout this important 1991 study of American Romanticism Professor Porte offers provocative reassessments of familiar and less familiar texts. Throughout this important new study of American Romanticism Professor Porte offers provocative reassessments of familiar and less familiar texts.

In Modernism, Mass Culture and Professionalism Thomas Strychacz argues that modernist writers need to be understood both in their relationship to professional critics and in their relationship to an era and ethos of professionalism.

This book considers the portrayal of the American national character in the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. It examines Hawthorne's abiding concern with the development of New England from colony to province to republic, and analyses Melville's changing evocation of 'the new American', and the difficulties he faced in sustaining his heady nationalistic faith.

Emily Dickinson has long been seen as a figure isolated from her contemporaries and insulated from her surrounding culture. This book attempts to place her texts in their cultural contexts.

This 2003 book presents a comparative investigation of colonial prose narratives in Spanish and British America from 1542 to 1800. It discusses narratives of shipwreck, captivity and travel, as well as imperial and natural histories of the New World in the context of transformative early modern scientific ideologies.

Robinson discusses each of Emerson's major later works noting their increasing orientation to a philosophy of the 'conduct of life'. These books represent Emerson's attempt to forge a philosophy based on the centrality of domestic life, vocation and social relations and they reveal Emerson as an ethical philosopher who stressed the spiritual value of human relations, work and social action.

The essays assembled here vary in approach, but they share a commitment to the discipline of history and an awareness that history can function as critique as well as celebration. Several contributors take issue with Eliot's self-presentation and include documents Eliot chose not to emphasise.

This is a critical and historical interpretation of 'Oriental' influences on American modernist poetry. Kern equates Fenollosa and Pound's 'discovery' of Chinese writing with the American pursuit of a natural language for poetry, what Emerson had termed the 'language of nature'.

Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry is an inquiry into the cultural roles lyric poetry does and can play in our age. Charles Altieri first establishes a dominant mode in 'serious' American poetry by identifying current assumptions inherent in the teaching of creative writing and the awarding of prizes and contracts.

Robert Levine has examined the American romance in a historical context. His book offers a fresh reading of the genre, establishing its importance to American culture between the founding of the republic and the Civil war.

Grusin investigates how the establishment of national parks participated in the production of American national identity after the Civil War. He explores the origins of America's three major parks - Yosemite, Yellowstone and Grand Canyon - in relation to other forms of landscape representation in the late nineteenth century.

Mark Twain's preoccupation with the nature and value of the 'feminine' has long been recognized as a central feature of his writing. In this 1992 volume, Peter Stoneley goes beyond generalizations to provide a detailed analysis of this theme.

The Divided Mind examines the debate between innovation and tradition in American culture of the early years of the twentieth century. Peter Conn discusses literature, painting, music, architecture and politics, using illustrations of the artwork, buildings and popular graphics of the period.