Prodigal Daughters: Susanna Rowson's Early American Women

University of North Carolina Press, 2008

Marion Rust

Susanna Rowson--novelist, actress, playwright, poet, school founder, and early national celebrity—bears little resemblance to the title character in her most famous creation, Charlotte Temple. Yet this best-selling novel has long been perceived as the prime exemplar of female passivity and subjugation in the early Republic. Marion Rust disrupts this view by placing the novel in the context of Rowson's life and other writings. Rust shows how an early form of American sentimentalism mediated the constantly shifting balance between autonomy and submission that is key to understanding both Rowson's work and the lives of early American women.

Dramas of Solitude: Narratives of Retreat in American Nature Writing

SUNY Press, 1998.
SUNY Series, Literacy, Culture, and Learning: Theory and Practice

Randall Roorda

Roorda brings the insights of narrative theory to bear upon the genre of nature writing, to explore the social or ethical purposes of solitude in stories of retreat in nature. This book complicates social views of literacy with depictions of a solitude held in dynamic relation to a not-only-human community. It will inform the efforts of literary critics and writing teachers alike who hope to reintegrate English studies upon ecological terms.

Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States

Pittsburgh University Press, 2002.

Janet Carey Eldred
and Peter Mortensen

This book examines how women's writing developed in the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War and how women imagined using their education to further the civic aims of an idealistic new nation.

Invisible Natives: Myth & Identity in the American Western

Cornell University Press, 2002.

This book casts a critical eye on the representation of Native Americans in the Western film since the genre's beginnings. Armando Jose Prats shows the ways in which film reflects cultural transformations in the course of America's historical encounter with "the Indian." He also explores the relation between the myth of conquest and American history. Among the films he discusses at length are Northwest Passage, Stagecoach, The Searchers, Hombre, Hondo, Ulzana's Raid, The Last of the Mohicans, and Dances with Wolves.

Elvis Presley

Penguin, 2003.
Penguin Lives Series

Bobbie Ann Mason

When Mason first heard Elvis Presley on the family radio, she recognized him as "one of us . . . a country person who spoke our language." She understood the roots of his powerful, startling music. This biography captures all the vibrancy and tragedy of the mythic figure, Elvis.

With a novelist's insight, Mason depicts the amazing life of the first rock-and-roll superstar, whose music shattered barriers and changed the boundaries of American culture. Elvis the charismatic, impassioned singer embraced the celebrity brought him by a host of hit records and movies. But Elvis the soft-spoken, working-class Southern youth could not be prepared for the unprecedented magnitude of his success--or for the fiery controversies he would arouse. His riveting story lies close to the heart of the American dream.

America's Culture of Terrorism: Violence, Capitalism, and the Written Word

University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Jeffory A. Clymer

Although the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 shocked the world, America has confronted terrorism at home for well over a century. With the invention of dynamite in 1866, Americans began to worry about anonymous acts of mass violence in a way that differed from previous generations' fears of urban riots, slave uprisings, and mob violence. Focusing on the volatile period between the 1886 Haymarket bombing and the 1920 bombing outside J. P. Morgan's Wall Street office, Jeffory Clymer argues that economic and cultural displacements caused by the expansion of industrial capitalism directly influenced evolving ideas about terrorism.

Cruising Modernism: Class and Sexuality in American Literature and Social Thought

Cornell University Press

Michael Trask

Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes: Back Talk from an American Region

The University of Kentucky Press

Dwight Billings, Gurney Norman, and Katherine Ledford

Dismayed by national critics’ lack of attention to the negative depictions of mountain people in Robert Schenkkan’s 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, The Kentucky Cycle, a group of Appalachian scholars rallied against the stereotypical representations of the region’s people that repeatedly appear in print and pop culture. In Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes, historians, literary scholars, sociologists, creative writers, and activists talk back to the American mainstream, confronting head-on those who would view their home region one-dimensionally.

An American Vein: Critical Readings in Appalachian Literature

Ohio University Press

Danny L. Miller, Sharon Hatfield, and Gurney Norman

Many writers from the mountains have found success and acclaim outside the region, but awareness of the region itself as a thriving center of literary creativity is not widespread. The editors of An American Vein have remedied this, producing the first general collection of Appalachian literary criticism. What’s more, it holds the promise of introducing new readers, nationally and internationally, to the Appalachian literature and its relevance to our times.

Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age

Duke University Press

Alan Nadel

Examining a broad sweep of American culture, from the works of George Kennan to Playboy Magazine, from the movies of Doris day and Walt Disney to those of Cecil B. deMille and Alfred Hitchcock, Nadel discloses the remarkable persuasiveness of the containment narrative. Drawing on insights provided by contemporary theorists he situates the rhetoric of the cold war within a gendered narrative powered by the unspoken potency of the atom. He then traces the breakdown of this discourse of containment and ties its collapse to the onset of American postmodernism.

Flatlining on the Field of Dreams: Cultural Narratives in the Films of President Reagan’s America

Rutgers University Press

Alan Nadel

Flatlining on the Field of Dreams demonstrates, with witty prose and careful analysis, how the overindulgent, image-conscious years of the Reagan administration are reflected in sundry aspects of American films produced during that era. Discussing dozens of films, Alan Nadel identifies narratives about credit, deregulation, gender, race, and masculinity that defined “President Reagan’s America.” The book provides hard-to-ignore demonstrations of the extensive synergy between politics, history, and pop culture.

Invisible Criticism

University of Iowa Press

Alan Nadel

This new reading of a classic work examines Ellison's relation to and critique of the American literary canon by demonstrating that the pattern of allusions in Invisible Man forms a literary-critical subtext which challenges the accepted readings of such major American authors as Emerson, Melville, and Twain. Modeling his argument on Foucault's analysis of the asylum, Nadel analyzes the institution of the South to show how it moved blacks from "enslavement" to "slavery" to "invisibility"—all in the interest of maintaining an organization of power based on racial caste. He then demonstrates the ways Ellison wrote in the modernist/surreal tradition to trace symbolically the history of blacks in America as they moved not only from the nineteenth century to the twentieth, and from the rural South to the urban North, but as they moved (sometimes unnoticed) through American fiction.

Hide and Seek: The Child between Psychoanalysis and Fiction

University of Illinois Press

Virginia L. Blum

In response to widespread cultural fantasies about the child- including childhood innocence, the child as origin of the adult, the fetal emergence of subjectivity, and the “inner child” movement-Hide and Seek examines representations of the child in fiction, psychoanalysis, and popular culture.

Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American Imperialism

University of Minnesota Press

Andy Doolen

In Fugitive Empire, Andy Doolen investigates the relationships among race, nation, and empire in colonial and early national America, revealing how whiteness and American identity were conflated to stabilize racial hierarchy and to repulse challenges to national policies of slavery, war, and continental expansion. Doolen concludes that imperial authority lies at the heart of American republicanism, an unstable mixture of idealism, force, and pragmatism, wielded in the name of freedom even today.

May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson

University of Iowa Press

Henry Louis Jr. Gates and Alan Nadel