Antebellum slave narratives have taken pride of place in the American literary canon. One key aspect of the genre, however, has been left unexamined: its materiality. In Fugitive Texts, Michaël Roy offers the first book-length study of the slave narrative as a material artifact. Drawing on a wide range of sources, he reconstructs the publication histories of a number of famous and lesser-known narratives, placing them against the changing backdrop of antebellum print culture. Published to rave reviews in French, Fugitive Texts illuminates the heterogeneous nature of a genre often described in monolithic terms and ultimately paves the way for a redefinition of the literary form we have come to recognize as "the slave narrative."

In The Republic in Print, Trish Loughran challenges a dominant narrative about nationalism: the idea that print culture produces nations. Focusing on the years between 1770 and 1870, Loughran develops two richly detailed and provocative arguments. First she argues that it was the lack of national infrastructure (rather than a tightly connected print network) that enabled the nation to be imagined between 1776 and 1790. She then describes how the increasingly connected book market of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s worked to exacerbate regional differences in ways that contributed to secession and civil war. Drawing on a range of literary, historical, and archival materials, The Republic in Print is a refreshing and original cultural history of the early American nation-state.