Companion to American Literary Studies

Caroline F. Levander is Carlson Professor in the Humanities, Professor of English, and Vice President for Strategic Initiatives and Digital Education at Rice University, USA. She is author of Hotel Life (with Matt Guterl, 2015), Where Is American Literature? (2013), Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Culture and Literature (1998) and Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W.E.B. Du Bois (2006); she is co-editor of The American Child: A Culture Studies Reader (2003), Hemispheric American Studies (2008), and Teaching and Studying the Americas (2010). Robert S. Levine is Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Maryland, USA. He is the author of Conspiracy and Romance (1989), Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (1997), Dislocating Race and Nation (2008), and The Lives of Frederick Douglass (forthcoming); he is also the editor of a number of volumes, including Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader (2003), The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1820-1865 (2007, 2012), and Hemispheric American Studies (with Caroline F. Levander, 2008).

• Notes on Contributors xIntroduction 1Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. LevinePart I. Forms 131 Poetry, Prose, and the Politics of Literary Form 15Russ Castronovo2 The Critical Work of American Literature 29Joel Pfister3 Women’s Worlds in the Nineteenth-Century US Novel 46Shirley Samuels4 The Secularization Narrative and Nineteenth-Century American Literature 61Elizabeth Fenton5 Literatures of Technology, Technologies of Literature 77Paul Gilmore6 Excluded Middles: Social Inequality in American Literature 93Gavin Jones7 Narrative Medicine, Biocultures, and the Visualization of Health and Disease 108Kirsten Ostherr8 Performance Anxieties: The A-Literary Companions of American Literary Studies 125Catherine Gunther Kodat9 Drama, Theatre, and Performance before O’Neill 141Jeffrey H. Richards10 Disliking It: American Poetry and American Literary Studies 158Mary Loeffelholz11 After the New Americanists: The Progress of Romance and the Romance of Progress in American Literary Studies 173Jennifer L. Fleissner12 Mass Media and Literary Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century 191Nancy BentleyPart II. Spaces 20913 Cabeza de Vaca, Lope de Oviedo, and Americas Exceptionalism 211Anna Brickhouse14 Worlding America: The Hemispheric Text-Network 228Susan Gillman and Kirsten Silva Gruesz15 Worlds of Color, Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in Early American Literary History 248Michelle Stephens16 Transatlantic Returns 264Elisa Tamarkin17 American Literature in Transnational Perspective: The Case of Mark Twain 279Shelley Fisher Fishkin18 Southern Literary Studies 294John T. Matthews19 New Regionalisms: US-Caribbean Literary Relations 310Sean X. Goudie20 American Literature as Ecosystem: The Examples of Euclides da Cunha and Cormac McCarthy 325George B. Handley21 Settler States of Feeling: National Belonging and the Erasure of Native American Presence 342Mark Rifkin22 Tribal Nations and the Other Territories of American Indian Literary History 356James H. Cox23 Globalization 373Paul GilesPart III. Practices 38724 Democratic Cultures and the First Century of US Literature 389Dana D. Nelson25 American Literature and Law 406Brook Thomas26 Sexuality and American Literary Studies 422Christopher Looby27 Exquisite Fragility: Human Being in the Aftermath of War 437Priscilla Wald28 The Posthuman Turn: Rewriting Species in Recent American Literature 454Ursula K. Heise29 Narrative and Intellectual Disability 469Michael Bérubé30 Reading for Asian American Literature 483Colleen Lye31 Untangling Genealogy’s Tangled Skeins: Alexander Crummell, James McCune Smith, and Nineteenth-Century Black Literary Traditions 500Carla L. Peterson32 Speculative Realism and the Postrace Aesthetic in Contemporary American Fiction 517Ramón Saldívar33 The New Life of the New Forms: American Literary Studies and the Digital Humanities 532Matt Cohen Index 549