American Literature in Transition, 1820-1860: Volume 2

Justine S. Murison is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge, 2011), and her articles have appeared in such venues as American Literature, ESQ, Early American Literature, and The New Melville Studies. She is also a general editor for the new Broadview anthology of American Literature.

• 1. Introduction: Literature for democracy Justine S. Murison; I. Fractures and Continuities: 2. Hemisphere Rodrigo Lazo; 3. Empire John Levi Barnard; 4. Economy David Anthony; 5. Religion Christine Hedlin and Toni Wall Jaudon; 6. Nature Kyla Schuller; 7. Removal Gina Caison; 8. Abolition Martha Schoolman; II. Forms and Formats: 9. Romance Emily Ogden; 10. Theatre Michelle Granshaw; 11. Popular poetry Michael C. Cohen; 12. Sentimentality Tess Chakkalakal; 13. African American print culture Derrick Spires; 14. Sexuality in print Jordan Alexander Stein; 15. Seriality Dale Bauer; 16. Unoriginality Claudia Stokes; III. Authors and Figures: 17. Apess/Sedgwick Ashley Reed; 18. Child/Thoreau Susan Ryan; 19. Douglass/Walker Marcy Dinius; 20. Emerson/Poe Christopher Hanlon; 21. Fuller/Stowe Dorri Beam; 22. Hawthorne/Winthrop Christopher Castiglia; 23. Melville/Whitman Kelly Ross; 24. Harper/Stewart Nazera Sadiq Wright.

'The volume's organization is clever and fuses together both older, 'traditional' forms of literary study (authors and genres) and newer forms of cultural studies. I can imagine the essays being used individually by instructors teaching undergraduate classes as well as more comprehensively by graduate students or anyone starting a new project who needs an overview of new work in the field and/or new perspectives on the foundational concepts, genres, and authors of the era. This collection is mercifully free of the hemming and hawing around aesthetic judgment, critical valuation, and the 'method wars' that have recently bogged down many other literary fields. … Each of the essays here uses varying and idiosyncratic blends of historicism, close reading, network theory, cultural study, biography, structuralism, poststructuralism, and more. I find in this methodological spontaneity the true heart of this delightfully weird field.' Sarah Blackwood, Early American Literature