A Companion to American Literary Studies addresses the most provocative questions, subjects, and issues animating the field. Essays provide readers with the knowledge and conceptual tools for understanding American literary studies as it is practiced today, and chart new directions for the future of the subject.

Notes on Contributors x Introduction 1 Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine Part I. Forms 13 1 Poetry, Prose, and the Politics of Literary Form 15 Russ Castronovo 2 The Critical Work of American Literature 29 Joel Pfister 3 Women’s Worlds in the Nineteenth-Century US Novel 46 Shirley Samuels 4 The Secularization Narrative and Nineteenth-Century American Literature 61 Elizabeth Fenton 5 Literatures of Technology, Technologies of Literature 77 Paul Gilmore 6 Excluded Middles: Social Inequality in American Literature 93 Gavin Jones 7 Narrative Medicine, Biocultures, and the Visualization of Health and Disease 108 Kirsten Ostherr 8 Performance Anxieties: The A-Literary Companions of American Literary Studies 125 Catherine Gunther Kodat 9 Drama, Theatre, and Performance before O’Neill 141 Jeffrey H. Richards 10 Disliking It: American Poetry and American Literary Studies 158 Mary Loeffelholz 11 After the New Americanists: The Progress of Romance and the Romance of Progress in American Literary Studies 173 Jennifer L. Fleissner 12 Mass Media and Literary Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century 191 Nancy Bentley Part II. Spaces 209 13 Cabeza de Vaca, Lope de Oviedo, and Americas Exceptionalism 211 Anna Brickhouse 14 Worlding America: The Hemispheric Text-Network 228 Susan Gillman and Kirsten Silva Gruesz 15 Worlds of Color, Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in Early American Literary History 248 Michelle Stephens 16 Transatlantic Returns 264 Elisa Tamarkin 17 American Literature in Transnational Perspective: The Case of Mark Twain 279 Shelley Fisher Fishkin 18 Southern Literary Studies 294 John T. Matthews 19 New Regionalisms: US-Caribbean Literary Relations 310 Sean X. Goudie 20 American Literature as Ecosystem: The Examples of Euclides da Cunha and Cormac McCarthy 325 George B. Handley 21 Settler States of Feeling: National Belonging and the Erasure of Native American Presence 342 Mark Rifkin 22 Tribal Nations and the Other Territories of American Indian Literary History 356 James H. Cox 23 Globalization 373 Paul Giles Part III. Practices 387 24 Democratic Cultures and the First Century of US Literature 389 Dana D. Nelson 25 American Literature and Law 406 Brook Thomas 26 Sexuality and American Literary Studies 422 Christopher Looby 27 Exquisite Fragility: Human Being in the Aftermath of War 437 Priscilla Wald 28 The Posthuman Turn: Rewriting Species in Recent American Literature 454 Ursula K. Heise 29 Narrative and Intellectual Disability 469 Michael Bérubé 30 Reading for Asian American Literature 483 Colleen Lye 31 Untangling Genealogy’s Tangled Skeins: Alexander Crummell, James McCune Smith, and Nineteenth-Century Black Literary Traditions 500 Carla L. Peterson 32 Speculative Realism and the Postrace Aesthetic in Contemporary American Fiction 517 Ramón Saldívar 33 The New Life of the New Forms: American Literary Studies and the Digital Humanities 532 Matt Cohen Index 549

A Companion to American Literary Studies addresses the most provocative questions, subjects, and issues animating the disciplinary field of “American literature.” It provides state-of-the-art essays on a full range of topics central to the field, examining the strengths and limitations of current scholarly and pedagogical practices and pointing to future developments and possibilities. The essays explore critical and institutional genealogies of the field, increasingly diverse conceptions of American literary study, and the unprecedented material changes to the field occasioned by emerging digital, new media, and visual technologies. Collectively, the essays provide readers with the knowledge and conceptual tools for understanding American literary studies as it is practiced today, and chart new directions for the future of the field. With its emphasis on histories, practices, and futures, this is an essential resource for anyone interested in American literary studies.