The house is perhaps the most recognizable emblem of the American ideals of self-making: prosperity, stability, domesticity, and upward mobility. Yet over the years from 1945-2021, the American house becomes more famous for the betrayal of those hopes than for their fulfilment: first, through the segregation of cities and public housing; then through the expansion of private credit that lays the ground for the subprime mortgage crisis of the early twenty-first century. Walt Hunter argues that, as access to housing expands to include a greater share of the US population, the house emerges as a central metaphor for the poetic imagination. From the kitchenette of Gwendolyn Brooks to the duplex of Jericho Brown, and from the suburban imagination of Adrienne Rich to the epic constructions of James Merrill, the American house poem represents the changing abilities of US poets to imagine new forms of life while also building on the past. In The American House Poem, 1945-2021, Hunter focuses on poets who register the unevenly distributed pressures of successive housing crises by rewriting older poetic forms. Writing about the materials, tools, and plans for making a house, these poets express the tensions between making their lives into art and freeing their lives from inherited constraints and conditions.

Political Liberalism and the Rise of American Romanticism explores how American Romanticism developed in response to pervasive conflicts over democracy's moral dimensions in the early republic and antebellum eras. By recovering the long-under-examined tradition of political liberalism for literary studies, it traces how US writers reacted to ongoing moral and political conflict by engaging with liberal thinkers and ideas as they endeavored to understand how individuals beholden to a divergent array of moral convictions might nevertheless share a stable and just political world—the very dilemma at the core of political liberalism. This study demonstrates how those philosophical engagements sparked Romanticism's rise and eventual flourishing as US writers increasingly embraced Romantic literary modes emphasizing the imagination's capacity for creative synthesis and the role it plays in shoring up the habits of mind and feeling that are vital to a meaningful democratic culture. It offers revisionary readings of works by Charles Brockden Brown, Robert Montgomery Bird, James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Nathaniel Hawthorne to show how these Romantic writers were preoccupied with how individuals come to embrace their deepest convictions and what happens when they encounter others who see the world differently.

Stephen Schryer traces the careers of novelists, journalists, and literary critics who wrote for William F. Buckley, Jr.'s National Review and highlights these writers' enduring impact on movement conservatism.

What happens if we reconsider the literature of the Civil War North in light of the transformation of the federal state's power? While literary scholarship about the Civil War has more generally focused on the rise of wartime nationalism, Philip Gould looks particularly at how literary works engage the subjects of censorship, propaganda, and the reconfigured meanings of "loyalty" and "treason" at a time of political crisis. During the war the Lincoln Administration shut down opposition newspapers and curtailed free expression and civil liberties protected by the US Constitution. Lincoln also suspended the writ of habeas corpus to deal with political dissenters and try to control public opinion. Early in the war, he coined the phrase "war power" to describe the (presumed) powers to address this crisis; his policies became controversial throughout the conflict. War Power: Literature and the State in the Civil War North considers literary production in this "total war" that radically changed the federal government's (and its military's) relation to traditional norms and spaces of private, domestic, and social life. Each chapter focuses on a major writer in the Civil War North's engagement with questions of identity, affect, and affiliation: Could one love the Union as one loved home and family? What were the implications for literary expression in the midst of a political culture being reshaped by censorship and propaganda? The final two chapters address the role and plight of African Americans in the Civil War and its aftermath, focusing particularly on African American military service as the supposed means by which racially disenfranchised Americans might become citizens.