The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature will offer a cutting-edge assessment of the period's literature, offering readers practical insights and proactive strategies for exploring novels, poems, and other literary creations.

More than ten years in the making, this comprehensive single-volume literary survey is for the student, scholar, and general reader. The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature represents a collaborative effort, involving 300 contributors from across the US and Canada. Composed of more than 1,100 signed biographical-critical entries, this Encyclopedia serves as both guide and companion to the study and appreciation of American literature. A special feature is the topical article, of which there are 70.

Gathered together for the first time, the essays in this volume were selected to give scholars ready access to important late-twentieth and early twenty-first-century contributions to scholarship on the Romantic period and twentieth-century literature and culture. Included are Charles J. Rzepka's award-winning essays on Keats's 'Chapman's Homer' sonnet and Wordsworth's 'Michael' and his critical intervention into anachronistic new historicist readings of the circumstances surrounding the composition of "Tintern Abbey." Other Romantic period essays provide innovative interpretations of De Quincey's relation to theatre and the anti-slavery movement. Genre is highlighted in Rzepka's exploration of race and region in Charlie Chan, while his interdisciplinary essay on The Wizard of Oz and the New Woman takes the reader on a journey that encompasses the Oz of L. Frank Baum and Victor Fleming as well as the professional lives of Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli. Taken together, the essays provide not only a career retrospective of an influential scholar and teacher but also a map of the innovations and controversies that have influenced literary studies from the early 1980s to the present. As Peter Manning observes in his foreword, "this collection shows that even in diverse essays the force of a curious and disciplined mind makes itself felt."

An accessible and highly readable guide to the story of Melville criticism as it has developed over the past century and a half. Herman Melville is among the most thoroughly canonized authors in American literature, and the body of criticism dealing with his writing is immense. Until now, however, there has been no standard volume on the history of Melvillecriticism. That a volume on this subject is timely and important is shown by the number of introductions and companions to Melville's work that have been published during the last few years (none of which focuses on the criticalreception of Melville's works), as well as the steady stream of critical monographs and scholarly biographies that have been published on Melville since the 1920s. Melville's Mirrors provides Melville scholars and graduateand undergraduate students with an accessible guide to the story of Melville criticism as it has developed over the years. It is a valuable reference for research libraries and for the personal libraries of scholars of Melville and of nineteenth-century American literature in general, and it is also a potential textbook for major-author courses on Melville, which are offered at many universities. BRIAN YOTHERS is the Frances Spatz Leighton Endowed Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso and associate editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. He is the author of Reading Abolition: The Critical Reception of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass (Camden House, 2016).

The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville provides timely, critical essays on Melville's classic works. The essays have been specially commissioned for this volume and provide a complete overview of Melville's career. Melville's major novels are discussed, along with a range of his short fiction and poetry, including neglected works ripe for rediscovery. The volume includes essays on such new topics as Melville and oceanic studies, Melville and animal studies, and Melville and the planetary, along with a number of essays that focus on form and aesthetics. Written at a level both challenging and accessible, this New Companion brings together a team of leading international scholars to offer students of American literature the most comprehensive introduction available to Melville's art.

This book explores the dark, unruly, and self-destructive side of gift-giving as represented in nineteenth-century literary works by American authors. It asserts the centrality and relevance of gift exchange for modern American literary and intellectual history and reveals the ambiguity of the gift in various social and cultural contexts, including those of race, sex, gender, religion, consumption, and literature. Focusing on authors as diverse as Emerson, Kirkland, Child, Sedgwick, Hawthorne, Poe, Douglass, Stowe, Holmes, Henry James, Twain, Howells, Wilkins Freeman, and O. Henry as well as lesser-known, obscure, and anonymous authors, Dangerous Giving explores ambivalent relations between dangerous gifts, modern ideology of disinterested giving, and sentimental tradition.

Critical Companion to Herman Melville examines the life and work of a writer who spent much of his career in obscurity.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.