American Literature in Transition, 1770-1828

Description

This volume presents a complex portrait of the United States of America grappling with the trials of national adolescence. Topics include (but are not limited to): the dynamics of language and power, the treachery of memory, the lived experience of racial and economic inequality, the aesthetics of Indigeneity, the radical possibilities of disability, the fluidity of gender and sexuality, the depth and culture-making power of literary genre, the history of poetics, the cult of performance, and the hidden costs of foodways. Taken together, the essays offer a vision of a vibrant, contradictory, and conflicted early US Republic resistant to consensus accountings and poised to inform new and better origin stories for the polity to come.

William Huntting Howell is Associate Professor of English at Boston University. He is the author of Against Self-Reliance: The Arts of Dependence in the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) and the co-editor (with Megan E. Walsh) of Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends (Broadview, 2016). His essays have appeared in American Literature, The William and Mary Quarterly, Early American Studies, Common-place, and Avidly, among others. Greta LaFleur is Associate Professor of American Studies at Yale University. Her research and teaching focus on early North American literary and cultural studies, the history of science, the history of race, the history and historiography of sexuality, and queer & trans studies. Her first book, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America, was published by The Johns Hopkins University Press in 2018. LaFleur is currently working on a new monograph, tentatively titled A Queer History of Sexual Violence (under contract with The University of Chicago Press). LaFleur's writing appears in Early American Literature, Early American Studies, American Quarterly, American Literature, and on the Los Angeles Review of Books and Public Books websites