The stories gathered here explore the vagaries of sexual desire, gender identity, and erotic attachment, revealing the surprising queerness of nineteenth-century American literature.

Inspired by the current public fascination with single women, Single Lives traces the relationship between modern and contemporary representations of single women. The original essays collected here analyze a broad range of texts that examine the ways films, cookbooks, archives, popular literature, and other British and American texts express norms, ideals, and challenges for single women and their relationship to dominant ideals of marriage and the family. This volume looks backwards to constellate existing scholarship, constituent fields, and unrecognized single voices and forward to consider new methods for interdisciplinary singles studies.

This book advances the theorization of normativity as a key concept in language and sexuality studies, bringing together some of the author’s previous work with new material for a comprehensive exploration of the influence of normativity on the relationship between language and sexuality. The first section of the book outlines fundamental areas of inquiry in language and sexuality studies today, with a focus on queer linguistic inquiry, and elucidates the book’s theoretical frameworks around normativity. Chapters in the section reflect on the ways in which normativity shapes sexuality-related language, how language is employed to convey sexual normativities and queer linguistic challenges for the use of research methods in the discipline through a discussion of their implementation in corpus linguistics. The second part of the book builds on these theoretical foundations by featuring seven case studies that illustrate a diverse range of methods and language data, with a concluding chapter considering the implications of their findings for furthering theoretical debates and future research on normativity in language and sexuality studies. This volume will be of interest to scholars in language and sexuality, language and gender, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, applied linguistics and corpus linguistics.

The Handbook of American Romanticism presents a comprehensive survey of the various schools, authors, and works that constituted antebellum literature in the United States. The volume is designed to feature a selection of representative case studies and to assess them within two complementary frameworks: the most relevant historical, political, and institutional contexts of the antebellum decades and the consequent (re-)appropriations of the Romantic period by academic literary criticism in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Neither the Time nor the Place considers how the space-time dyad has both troubled and invigorated Americanist scholarship in recent decades. Organized around considerations of citizenship, environment, historiography, media, and bodies, the book presents some of the most provocative new work being done in American literary studies today.

In The Biopolitics of Feeling Kyla Schuller unearths the forgotten, multiethnic sciences of impressibility—the capacity to be transformed by one's environment and experiences—to uncover how biopower developed in the United States. Schuller challenges prevalent interpretations of biopower and literary cultures to reveal how biopower emerged within the discourses and practices of sentimentalism. Through analyses of evolutionary theories, gynecological sciences, abolitionist poetry and other literary texts, feminist tracts, child welfare reforms, and black uplift movements, Schuller excavates a vast apparatus that regulated the capacity of sensory and emotional feeling in an attempt to shape the evolution of the national population. Her historical and theoretical work exposes the overlooked role of sex difference in population management and the optimization of life, illuminating how models of binary sex function as one of the key mechanisms of racializing power. Schuller thereby overturns long-accepted frameworks of the nature of race and sex difference, offers key corrective insights to modern debates surrounding the equation of racism with determinism and the liberatory potential of ideas about the plasticity of the body, and reframes contemporary notions of sentiment, affect, sexuality, evolution, and heredity.

Shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Assocation Book Prize Statue-fondlers, wanderlusters, sex magicians, and nymphomaniacs: the story of these forgotten sexualities—what Michel Foucault deemed “minor perverts”—has never before been told. In The Book of Minor Perverts, Benjamin Kahan sets out to chart the proliferation of sexual classification that arose with the advent of nineteenth-century sexology. The book narrates the shift from Foucault’s “thousand aberrant sexualities” to one: homosexuality. The focus here is less on the effects of queer identity and more on the lines of causation behind a surprising array of minor perverts who refuse to fit neatly into our familiar sexual frameworks. The result stands at the intersection of history, queer studies, and the medical humanities to offer us a new way of feeling our way into the past.

Moby-Dick's Ishmael and Queequeg share a bed, Janie in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God imagines her tongue in another woman's mouth. And yet for too long there has not been a volume that provides an account of the breadth and depth of queer American literature. This landmark volume provides the first expansive history of this literature from its inception to the present day, offering a narrative of how American literary studies and sexuality studies became deeply entwined and what they can teach each other. It examines how American literature produces and is in turn woven out of sexualities, gender pluralities, trans-ness, erotic subjectivities, and alternative ways of inhabiting bodily morphology. In so doing, the volume aims to do nothing less than revise the ways in which we understand the whole of American literature. It will be an indispensable resource for scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates.

Charles Warren Stoddard (1843–1909) was, during his life, an acclaimed and prolific writer in multiple genres: poetry, travel sketches, personal memoir, and conversion narrative. His most popular works were dispatches primarily from the South Sea Islands but also extended into Palestine, Egypt, and what would become known as Hawai‘i, most of which were published in the San Francisco Chronicle and then collected into books. For the Pleasure of His Company: An Affair of the Misty City, Thrice Told (1903) is Stoddard’s only novel. This new edition, as with other works in Penn Press’s series Q19: The Queer American Nineteenth Century, returns and reframes an important queer literary text to print. Set mostly in and around San Francisco in the late nineteenth century, the novel features a protagonist, Paul Clitheroe, who is an aspiring writer living among the Bohemian artistic circles of that place and time—the same circles Stoddard himself inhabited. The novel is both formally experimental and largely autobiographical. Thus Paul comes into contact, as Stoddard did, with writers, artists, actors, directors, priests, adventurers, and many others as he attempts to begin his career. Bohemian artistic life and erotic experimentation go hand in hand here: Paul has multiple relationships with other men even as he writes a novel that features similar liaisons. At the very end of the story, while on a cruise in the Pacific, Paul impulsively leaves his ship and disappears in a canoe with some young Hawaiian men. This parallels Stoddard’s life too: he spent many long periods of his life in Hawai‘i, where he found the local homoerotic customs to his liking. This Q19 volume also includes three of Stoddard’s Hawaiian travel sketches, which chronicle his intimate personal relationship with a Hawaiian youth he calls Kána-Aná. The volume contains a full critical introduction as well as extensive annotations explaining textual references of various kinds and identifying parallels with Stoddard’s own life.

Restoring proto-modernist little magazines—known as ephemeral bibelots—to the scholarly canon. Emanating from the cabarets of modernist Paris, a short-lived vogue spread around the world for avant-garde journals known in English as "ephemeral bibelots." For a time, it seemed that all the young bohemians passing through Paris started their own bibelots modeled on Le Chat Noir, the esoteric magazine of the famed Montmartre cabaret. These journals were recognizable for their decadence, campy queerness, astounding art nouveau illustrations, fin-de-siècle color schemes, innovative typefaces, and practiced bohemianism. In Ephemeral Bibelots, Brad Evans relays the untold story of this late-nineteenth-century craze for bibelots, dusting off a trove of periodicals largely untouched by digitization. In excavating this forgotten archive, Evans calls into question the prehistory of modernist little magazines as well as the history of American art and literature at the turn of the twentieth century. Considering how artistic movements take shape, move, and disappear, the book is organized around three major themes—"vogue," "ephemera," and "obscurity"—with authors and artists to match. A full-color insert reveals a glorious array of bibelot covers. This revisionary history of print culture incorporates discussions of pragmatist philosophy and relational aesthetics; women writers like Juliet Wilbor Tompkins and Carolyn Wells; the graphic artists Will Bradley, Louis Rhead, and John Sloan; the dancer Loie Fuller; and twentieth-century figures like H. L. Mencken, Amy Lowell, and Anita Loos. Bringing nineteenth-century American literature and culture into conversation with modern art movements from around the world, Ephemeral Bibelots provides new ways of thinking about the centrality of various media cultures to the attribution of aesthetic innovation and its staying power.