Each essay in this collection focuses on an individual classical American author--Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Moore, and Stevens--and the author's primary works. Traditional interpretations are reassessed based on close study of source texts and criticism.

This book provides a new map of American literature in the global era, analyzing the multiple meanings of transnationalism.

For more than a decade, Americanists have been concerned with the problem of ideology, and have undertaken a broad reassessment of American literature and culture. This volume brings together some of the best work in this area.

American Literature Before 1880 attempts to place its subject in the broadest possible international perspective. It begins with Homer looking westward, and ends with Henry James crossing the Atlantic eastwards. In between, the book examines the projection of images of the East onto an as-yet unrecognised West; the cultural consequences of Viking, Colombian, and then English migration to America; the growth and independence of the British American colonies; the key writers of the new Republic; and the development of the culture of the United States before and after the Civil War. It is intended both as an introduction for undergraduates to the richness and variety of American Literature, and as a contribution to the debate about its distinctive nature. The book therefore begins with a lengthy survey of earlier histories of American Literature.

This landmark book, the concluding volume in a magisterial series, presents the story of America's interwoven history and geography from 1915 to 2000. Discussing such developments as the automotive, neotechnic, and communications revolutions, the world wars, urban migration, and regionalism, D.W. Meinig offers unprecedented insights into the reshaping of the United States. "Meinig at his best: he presents a masterly synthesis of the cultural complexity of America, a compelling account of the dramatic but immensely complicated restructuring of its human geography during the twentieth century."--Graeme Wynn, Journal of Historical Geography "This work will shape the way many people view the United States for a long time to come. Essential."--Choice "This splendid work concludes the most ambitious writing project of any American geographer, ever. Global America meets and even exceeds the high standards set by the previous three volumes."--John C. Hudson, Northwestern University

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Few concepts are more widely discussed or more passionately invoked in American public culture than that of privacy. What these discussions have lacked, however, is a historically informed sense of privacy's genealogy in U.S. culture. Now, Milette Shamir traces this peculiarly American obsession back to the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when our modern understanding of privacy took hold. Shamir explores how various discourses, as well as changes in the built environment, worked in tandem to seal, regulate, and sanctify private spaces, both domestic and subjective. She offers revelatory readings of texts by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, and other, less familiar antebellum writers and looks to a wide array of sources, including architectural blueprints for private homes, legal cases in which a "right to privacy" supplements and exceeds property rights, examples of political rhetoric vaunting the sacred inviolability of personal privacy, and conduct manuals prescribing new codes of behavior to protect against intrusion.

This landmark book, the concluding volume of D. W. Meinig’s magisterial series The Shaping of America, presents the story of America’s interwoven history and geography from 1915 to 2000. The author describes decades of enormous national growth and change in his characteristic engaging style, and through more than seventy original maps he ingeniously depicts diverse twentieth-century trends and developments. The book addresses the expanding nation’s progress in terms of the automotive revolution; neotechnic evolution; access to air travel; growth of instantaneous forms of communication, including telephones, television, and the Internet; and such political events as World War II. Meinig relates these developments to social and geographic trends, among them patterns of urban migration, regionalism, metropolitanization, the beginnings of the urban megalopolis, shifts in ethnic and religious populations, and, on a more global scale, transformations in America’s connections with Europe, Asia, and Latin America. A masterful synthesis of twentieth-century history and geography, this book offers unprecedented insights into the shaping and reshaping of the United States over the past century.

Focusing on the genre of poetry, Kete argues that sentimentality functioned within the American Romantic period as a mode by which subjects fashioned a system of values which tended to define middle-class in the19th century.

The Routledge Companion to Native American Literature engages the multiple scenes of tension — historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic — that constitutes a problematic legacy in terms of community identity, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, language, and sovereignty in the study of Native American literature. This important and timely addition to the field provides context for issues that enter into Native American literary texts through allusions, references, and language use. The volume presents over forty essays by leading and emerging international scholars and analyses: regional, cultural, racial and sexual identities in Native American literature key historical moments from the earliest period of colonial contact to the present worldviews in relation to issues such as health, spirituality, animals, and physical environments traditions of cultural creation that are key to understanding the styles, allusions, and language of Native American Literature the impact of differing literary forms of Native American literature. This collection provides a map of the critical issues central to the discipline, as well as uncovering new perspectives and new directions for the development of the field. It supports academic study and also assists general readers who require a comprehensive yet manageable introduction to the contexts essential to approaching Native American Literature. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the past, present and future of this literary culture. Contributors: Joseph Bauerkemper, Susan Bernardin, Susan Berry Brill de Ramírez, Kirby Brown, David J. Carlson, Cari M. Carpenter, Eric Cheyfitz, Tova Cooper, Alicia Cox, Birgit Däwes, Janet Fiskio, Earl E. Fitz, John Gamber, Kathryn N. Gray, Sarah Henzi, Susannah Hopson, Hsinya Huang, Brian K. Hudson, Bruce E. Johansen, Judit Ágnes Kádár, Amelia V. Katanski, Susan Kollin, Chris LaLonde, A. Robert Lee, Iping Liang, Drew Lopenzina, Brandy Nālani McDougall, Deborah Madsen, Diveena Seshetta Marcus, Sabine N. Meyer, Carol Miller, David L. Moore, Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Mark Rifkin, Kenneth M. Roemer, Oliver Scheiding, Lee Schweninger, Stephanie A. Sellers, Kathryn W. Shanley, Leah Sneider, David Stirrup, Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr., Tammy Wahpeconiah