The New Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies

Russ Castronovo, Robert S. Levine

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009296700
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The New Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies takes stock of critical developments over the past twenty years, offering a fresh examination of key interpretative issues in this field. In eclectic fashion, it presents a wide range of new approaches in such areas as print and material culture, Black studies, Latinx studies, disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, postsecular studies, and Indigenous studies. This volume also maps out new directions for the future of the field. The evidence and examples discussed by the contributors are compelling, grounded in case studies of key literary texts, both familiar and understudied, that help to bring critical debate into focus and model fresh interpretive perspectives. Essays provide new readings and framings of such figures as Herman Melville, Harriet Wilson, Charles Chesnutt, Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, and Zitkála-Šá.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series information
• Title page
• Imprints page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Taking Stock and New Directions
• Chapter 1 Harriet Wilson’s Lessons: Disability and Nineteenth-Century American Literature
• Chapter 2 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the New Civil War Literary Studies
• Chapter 3 The Global South: A Speculative Exercise
• Chapter 4 Making It New: William Cullen Bryant’s Iliad and Postbellum Poetics
• Chapter 5 Law, Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies, and the Black Formalist Tradition
• Chapter 6 Conjuring Nineteenth-Century Black Environmentalism
• Chapter 7 Transitioning Queer Studies in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
• Chapter 8 New Materialisms and Scalar Collapse in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies
• Chapter 9 Nineteenth-Century Spanish-Language Textbooks and US American Literature
• Chapter 10 The Political Functions of Reconstruction Literature, Then and Now
• Chapter 11 Echoes from the Past, Archives of the Future: Latinx Authors and Spanish-Language Print Culture
• Chapter 12 Beyond the Secularization Thesis: The Postsecular Turn in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies
• Chapter 13 A Periodical Masquerade: The History of the Book in Nineteenth-Century America, Unbound
• Chapter 14 Tasteful Sketches and Tasteless Ambition: Rethinking the Place of the Sketch in Nineteenth-Century US Literature
• Chapter 15 Grounding Nineteenth-Century Studies in Indigenous Studies
• Chapter 16 Cultures of Data: Antebellum Literature and the Quantitative Turn
• Chapter 17 Rethinking Critical Geographies: Transamerican Studies, the Pacific, and the Nineteenth-Century United States
• Chapter 18 Rethinking Black Speculative Fiction: The Example of Charles Chesnutt
• Chapter 19 The Black Pacific: New Directions in Race and Transnationalism
• Chapter 20 ‘‘Unfeeling Stone’’: Rethinking Sentimentality at the Heart of Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies
• Index