Gender in American Literature and Culture introduces readers to key developments in gender studies and American literary criticism. It offers nuanced readings of literary conventions and genres from early American writings to the present and moves beyond inflexible categories of masculinity and femininity that have reinforced misleading assumptions about public and private spaces, domesticity, individualism, and community. The book also demonstrates how rigid inscriptions of gender have perpetuated a legacy of violence and exclusion in the United States. Responding to a sense of 21st century cultural and political crisis, it illuminates the literary histories and cultural imaginaries that have set the stage for urgent contemporary debates.

Accounts of the rise of American literature often start in the 1850s with a cluster of "great American novels"—Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But these great works did not spring fully formed from the heads of their creators. All three relied on conventions of short fiction built up during the "culture of beginnings," the three decades following the War of 1812 when public figures glorified the American past and called for a patriotic national literature. Decentering the novel as the favored form of early nineteenth-century national literature, Lydia Fash repositions the sketch and the tale at the center of accounts of American literary history, revealing how cultural forces shaped short fiction that was subsequently mined for these celebrated midcentury novels and for the first novel published by an African American. In the shorter works of writers such as Washington Irving, Catharine Sedgwick, Edgar Allan Poe, and Lydia Maria Child, among others, the aesthetic of brevity enabled the beginning idea of a story to take the outsized importance fitted to the culture of beginnings. Fash argues that these short forms, with their ethnic exclusions and narrative innovations, coached readers on how to think about the United States’ past and the nature of narrative time itself. Combining history, print history, and literary criticism, this book treats short fiction as a vital site for debate over what it meant to be American, thereby offering a new account of the birth of a self-consciously national literary tradition.

The Cambridge Introduction to Early American Literature offers students a literary history of American writing in English between 1492 and 1820, as well as providing a concise social and cultural history of these three centuries. Emory Elliott traces the impact of race, gender, and ethnic conflict on early American culture, and explores the centrality of American Puritanism in the formation of a distinctively American literature. This highly engaging and comprehensive study will be essential reading for students of the literature, history and culture of early America.

American Literature, American Culture is the first comprehensive anthology of American literary criticism to appear in many years and the first collection to bring together the tradition of American literary criticism as cultural critique. This unique anthology assembles reviews of early works, major critical essays, excerpts from landmark studies, and the most influential examples of the criticism practiced today. The selections address the dominant questions in the American literary tradition: What are the cultural responsibilities of the American writer? What are the characteristics of a national literature? Is a national literature even possible? How do gender and race affect the way we understand literature? What role does literature play in a democratic society? Organized chronologically, the four sections of the volume gather the most vital and enduring arguments in American literary and cultural politics in each era, covering such prominent issues as American exceptionalism, the racial divide, gender, and class identity. The book pays particular attention to the historical background of contemporary debates about multiculturalism. American Literature, American Culture is ideal for undergraduate and graduate courses in American literature, criticism, and American Studies. It also serves as a useful supplementary text in upper-level courses in criticism. Its range proves that at every juncture of the nation's intellectual history, criticism has provided an indispensable way of determining America's most fundamental meanings.

Organized primarily in terms of genre, this handbook includes original research on key concepts, as well as analysis of interesting texts from throughout colonial America. Separate chapters are devoted to literary genres of great importance at the time of their composition that have been neglected in recent decades.

Taking his cue from Philadelphia-born novelist Charles Brockden Brown's Annals of Europe and America, which contends that America is shaped most noticeably by the international struggle between Great Britain and France for control of the world trade market, Stephen Shapiro charts the advent, decline, and reinvigoration of the early American novel. That the American novel "sprang so unexpectedly into published existence during the 1790s" may be a symptom of the beginning of the end of Franco-British supremacy and a reflection of the power of a middle class riding the crest of a new world economic system. Shapiro's world-systems approach is a relatively new methodology for literary studies, but it brings two particularly useful features to the table. First, it refines the conceptual frameworks for analyzing cultural and social history, such as the rise in sentimentalism, in relation to a long-wave economic history of global commerce; second, it fosters a new model for a comparative American Studies across time. Rather than relying on contiguous time, a world-systems approach might compare the cultural production of one region to another at the same location within the recurring cycle in an economic reconfiguration. Shapiro offers a new way of thinking about the causes for the emergence of the American novel that suggests a fresh way of rethinking the overall paradigms shaping American Studies.

Early American Writings brings together a wide range of writings from the era of colonization of the Americas through the period of confederation in North America and the formation of the new United States of America. The anthology includes materials representing cultures indigenous to the Americas as well as writings by British, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, Swedish, German, African, and African American peoples in America during the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. With more than 170 writers included, the collection represents the works known and admired in the writers' own day, illustrates the diversity of interests and peoples depicted in those writings, and demonstrates the range of cross-cultural references early American readers experienced. The breadth of the collection provides readers with a fuller understanding of the backdrop for what is known as "American" culture today, in all its diversity. Early American Writings includes several original translations and features more poetry than any other anthology in the field. Each section covers a different period of colonization and is introduced by extensive commentary. All selections have been carefully annotated to help students place the writings in their cultural and regional contexts. Ideal for courses in early/colonial American literature and culture, colonial American studies, American studies, and American history, Early American Writings gives students an unprecedented look into the diverse and fascinating culture of early America.

With the publication of the 1619 Project by The New York Times in 2019, a growing number of Americans have become aware that Africans arrived in North America before the Pilgrims. Yet the stories of these Africans and their first descendants remain ephemeral and inaccessible for both the general public and educators. This groundbreaking collection of thirty-eight biographical and autobiographical texts chronicles the lives of literary black Africans in British colonial America from 1643 to 1760 and offers new strategies for identifying and interpreting the presence of black Africans in this early period. Brief introductions preceding each text provide historical context and genre-specific interpretive prompts to foreground their significance. Included here are transcriptions from manuscript sources and colonial newspapers as well as forgotten texts. The Earliest African American Literatures will change the way that students and scholars conceive of early American literature and the role of black Africans in the formation of that literature.