American Literatures Initiative imprint: 27 books
The Archival Turn in Feminism
Outrage in Order
Language: English
Release Date: July 26, 2013
In the 1990s, a generation of women born during the rise of the second wave feminist movement plotted a revolution. These young activists funneled their outrage and energy into creating music, and zines using salvaged audio equipment and stolen time on copy machines. By 2000, the cultural artifacts...
Specters of Conquest
Indigenous Absence in Transatlantic Literatures
Language: English
Release Date: June 12, 2010
This book intervenes in transatlantic and hemispheric studies by positing "America" as not a particular country or continent but a foundational narrative, in which conquerors arrive at a shore intent on overwriting local versions of humanity, culture, and landscape with inscriptions of their...
An Ethics of Betrayal
The Politics of Otherness in Emergent U.S. Literatures and Culture
Language: English
Release Date: August 25, 2009
In An Ethics of Betrayal, Crystal Parikh investigates the theme and tropes of betrayal and treason in Asian American and Chicano/Latino literary and cultural narratives. In considering betrayal from an ethical perspective, one grounded in the theories of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, Parikh...
Salvage Work
U.S. and Caribbean Literatures amid the Debris of Legal Personhood
Language: English
Release Date: April 1, 2015
Salvage Work examines contemporary literary responses to the law’s construction of personhood in the Americas. Tracking the extraordinary afterlives of the legal slave personality from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first, Angela Naimou shows the legal slave to be a fractured but generative...
Ghost-Watching American Modernity
Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2012
In Ghost-Watching American Modernity, María del Pilar Blanco revisits nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts from Spanish America and the United States to ask how different landscapes are represented as haunted sites. Moving from foundational fictions to Westerns, Blanco explores the diverse ways...
Poetics of Emptiness
Transformations of Asian Thought in American Poetry
Language: English
Release Date: October 3, 2011
The Poetics of Emptiness uncovers an important untold history by tracing the historically specific, intertextual pathways of a single, if polyvalent, philosophical term, emptiness, as it is transformed within twentieth-century American poetry and poetics.
This conceptual migration is detailed in two...
American Metempsychosis
Emerson, Whitman, and the New Poetry
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2012
The “transmigration of souls is no fable. I would it were, but men and women are only half human.” With these words, Ralph Waldo Emerson confronts a dilemma that illuminates the formation of American individualism: to evolve and become fully human requires a heightened engagement with history....
Tricksters and Cosmopolitans
Cross-Cultural Collaborations in Asian American Literary Production
Language: English
Release Date: August 1, 2016
Tricksters and Cosmopolitans is the first sustained exploration into the history of cross-cultural collaborations between Asian American writers and their non–Asian American editors and publishers. The volume focuses on the literary production of the cosmopolitan subject, featuring the writers Sui...
by Matthew Stratton
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2013
Shortlisted for the 2015 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize
This book shows how American literary culture in the first half of the twentieth century saw “irony” emerge as a term to describe intersections between aesthetic and political practices. Against conventional associations...
Democracy's Spectacle
Sovereignty and Public Life in Antebellum American Writing
Language: English
Release Date: January 3, 2011
"What is the hangman but a servant of law? And what is that law but an expression of public opinion? And if public opinion be brutal and thou a component part thereof, art thou not the hangman's accomplice?" Writing in 1842, Lydia Maria Child articulates a crisis in the relationship of democracy...
After Translation
The Transfer and Circulation of Modern Poetics Across the Atlantic
Language: English
Release Date: May 1, 2013
Translation—from both a theoretical and a practical point of view—articulates differing but interconnected modes of circulation in the work of writers originally from different geographical areas of transatlantic encounter, such as Europe, Latin America, North America, and the Caribbean.
After...
The Sentimental Touch
The Language of Feeling in the Age of Managerialism
Language: English
Release Date: December 24, 2012
Between 1850 and 1940, with the rise of managerial capitalism in the United States, the most powerful businesses ceased to be family owned, instead becoming sprawling organizations controlled by complex bureaucracies. Sentimental literature—work written specifically to convey and inspire deep feeling—does...
The Body of Property
Antebellum American Fiction and the Phenomenology of Possession
Language: English
Release Date: September 15, 2014
What does it mean to own something? How does a thing become mine? Liberal philosophy since John Locke has championed the salutary effects of private property but has avoided the more difficult questions of property’s ontology. Chad Luck argues that antebellum American literature is obsessed with...
Inventing the Language to Tell It
Robinson Jeffers and the Biology of Consciousness
Language: English
Release Date: September 2, 2013
From 1920 until his death in 1962, consciousness and its effect on the natural world was Robinson Jeffers’s obsession. Understanding and explaining the biological basis of mind is one of the towering challenges of modern science to this day, and Jeffers’s poetic experiment is an important contribution...
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