Annie McClanahan. Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2017) ix + 235pp. Amerikastudien / American Studies 63.4 Any discussion of twenty-first-century debt and economic crisis in the United States will necessarily involve some very large numbers. As Annie McClanahan notes, there were 8.2 million mortgage foreclosures during the Great Recession…
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Ina Bergmann and Stefan Hippler, eds., Cultures of Solitude: Loneliness – Limitation – Liberation (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2017), 330 pp. Amerikastudien / American Studies 63.4 Cultures of Solitude is not only a collection of 17 essays that focus on the implications of solitude in American culture with a particular emphasis on loneliness, limitation, and…
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Monika Sauter, Devoted! Frauen in der evangelikalen Populärkultur der USA (Bielefeld: transcript, 2017), 204 pp. Amerikastudien / American Studies 63.4 In Devoted!, American studies scholar Monika Sauter introduces the reader to an eclectic selection of contemporary published and broadcasted materials—from novels, self-help books, fitness guides, films, and documentaries to the homepage of a chastity organization—which…
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Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, We Know All About You: The Story of Surveillance in Britain and America (Oxford UP, 2017), 304 pp. Amerikastudien / American Studies 63.4 The 2013 NSA scandal triggered by whistleblower Edward Snowden intensified fears that new technologies and government surveillance had ushered in an era of “post-privacy,”[1] the age of the “surveillance society.”[2]…
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Leigh Eric Schmidt, Village Atheists: How America’s Unbelievers Made Their Way in a Godly Nation (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2016), 360 pp. Amerikastudien / American Studies 63.4 When Samuel Porter Putnam sat down at the end of the nineteenth century to write his history of atheism, he faced some tough editorial choices. Who to include under…
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Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, The Nature of Childhood: An Environmental History of Growing Up in America Since 1865 (Lawrence, KS: UP of Kansas, 2014), 273 pp. Starting from her personal childhood experiences in Denver, Colorado, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg takes up the challenge of writing an environmental history of childhood of the past 150 years for the American Midwest.…
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Heike Bungert, Festkultur und Gedächtnis: Die Konstruktion einer deutschamerikanischen Ethnizität 1848-1914 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2016), 637 pp. Amerikastudien / American Studies 63.4 German immigrants in the United States held on to their customs and traditions, replicating many of them in the New World. This included numerous festivities, often conducted by one of the many German-American associations…
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Mehring, Frank, The Democratic Gap: Transcultural Confrontations of German Immigrants and the Promise of American Democracy (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014), 403 pp. European Views of the United States 5. Amerikastudien / American Studies 63.4 Frank Mehring’s award-winning study is a much-welcomed addition to several areas of American Studies: It provides an original contribution to the cultural…
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Sabine N. Meyer, We Are What We Drink: The Temperance Battle in Minnesota (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2015), 288 pp. Amerikastudien / American Studies 63.4 Man sollte meinen, über die amerikanische Temperenzbewegung des langen 19. Jahrhunderts sei auf beiden Seiten des Atlantiks schon hinreichend viel geforscht und geschrieben worden. Es sei nur an die…
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Kevin Slack, Benjamin Franklin, Natural Right, and the Art of Virtue (Rochester: Rochester UP, 2017), 305 pp. Amerikastudien / American Studies 63.4 This erudite study reconstructs Benjamin Franklin’s political philosophy from the rich wealth of his essays written before 1760. Claiming that Franklin’s “science of virtue” was fully developed before the process of the American…
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Nadja Gernalzick and Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez, eds. Transmediality and Transculturality (Heidelberg: Winter, 2013), 444 pp. Amerikastudien / American Studies 63.3 As Nadja Gernalzick and Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez, the editors of the essay volume Transmediality and Transculturality, note in their preface, the notion of “transculturation” traces back to the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortíz’s 1940 study Contrapunteo cubano del…
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Christian Kloeckner, Simone Knewitz, and Sabine Sielke, eds. Knowledge Landscapes North America (Heidelberg: Winter, 2016), 305 pp. Amerikastudien / American Studies 63.3 The recent endeavors of the Trump administration to instigate reforms regarding political, educational, and ecological programs (to put it very mildly), as well as its attempts to recalibrate what knowledge is and how…
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Richard J. Schneider, Civilizing Thoreau: Human Ecology and the Emerging Social Sciences in the Major Works (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2016), 212 pp. Amerikastudien / American Studies 63.3 Thanks largely to the magnificent work of Robert Richardson (Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, 1986) and Robert Sattelmeyer (Thoreau’s Reading, 1988), Thoreauvians have for some…
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Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2016), 176 pp. Stephen Siperstein, Shane Hall, and Stephanie LeMenager, eds., Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities (London/New York: Routledge, 2017), 294 pp. Amerikastudien / American Studies 63.3 Despite its grave threat, climate change continues to be treated…
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Alexa Weik von Mossner, Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative (Ohio State UP, 2017), 271 pp. Amerikastudien / American Studies 63.3 One oft-repeated tale from the American Civil War era has it that Abraham Lincoln greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as “the little woman who wrote the…
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Hubert Zapf, ed., Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2016), 715 pp. Amerikastudien / American Studies 63.3 Gathering together many of the most inspiring international ecocritics all in one volume, Zapf’s Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology amps up the volume for environmental humanities; indeed, this is easily one of the…
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Scott Richard Lyons, ed., The World, the Text, and the Indian: Global Dimensions of Native American Literature (Albany: State U of New York P, 2017), 330 pp. Amerikastudien / American Studies 63.3 The collection of critical essays The World, the Text, and the Indian edited by Scott Richard Lyons is a noteworthy contribution to the…
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Shamoon Zamir, The Gift of the Face: Portraiture and Time in Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2014), 334 pp. Amerikastudien / American Studies 63.3 By the time the first volume of Edward S. Curtis’s work on The North American Indian was published in 1907, the scholarly…
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Manuel Menrath, Mission Sitting Bull: Die Geschichte der katholischen Sioux (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2016), 372 pp. Amerikastudien/American Studies 63.3 In the course of approaching American history with the methods of New Western History, a rich body of studies has emerged that reveals the vastness of Native American experiences in a new distinctiveness. In his new…
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HILARY E. WYSS, English Letters and Indian Literacies: Reading, Writing, and New England Missionary Schools, 1750-1830 (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2012), 264 pp. Amerikastudien/American Studies 63.3 In recent years there has been a noteworthy increase in studies of Native America.[1] Like Drew Lopenzina’s Red Ink: Native Americans Picking up the Pen in the Colonial…
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BRYCE TRAISTER, ED., The New Puritan Studies and American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017), 242 pp. Amerikastudien/American Studies 63.2 Surveying the field of American literary history in 1992, Sacvan Bercovitch found that “consensus of all kinds has broken down,” fragmented into “a Babel of contending approaches” (Rites of Assent 355). He especially meant the tradition…
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ANTJE KLEY and HEIKE PAUL, eds. Rural America, American Studies—A Monograph Series, Vol. 253 (Heidelberg: Winter, 2015), 510 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 63.2 In his Executive Order 13575 of June 9, 2011, then-President Barack Obama established the “White House Rural Council” in order to “promote economic prosperity and quality of life in our rural communities.”…
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KLAUS LÖSCH, HEIKE PAUL, and MEIKE ZWINGENBERGER, eds., Critical Regionalism (Heidelberg: Winter, 2016), 378 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 63.2 Regionalism has recently seen a revival in the form of critical regionalism studies. Instead of viewing regions as separate entities or as opposing the nation, critical regionalism espouses a wide range of concepts to approach regions…
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SUSANN NEUENFELDT, Schauspiele des Sehens: Die Figur der Flaneurin, Voyeurin und Stalkerin im U.S.-amerikanischen Essay, American Studies – A Monograph Series, Vol. 239 (Heidelberg: Winter, 2015), 294 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 63.2 Das Sehen ist kein neutraler Akt der Wahrnehmung, sondern es wohnen ihm Prozesse der Aneignung und Klassifizierung inne, welche die hierarchisierten Differenzen einer…
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AHU TANRISEVER, Fathers, Warriors, and Vigilantes: Post-Heroism and the US Cultural Imaginary in the Twenty-First Century, European Views of the United States, Vol. 10 (Heidelberg: Winter, 2016), 273 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 63.2 Research on heroic figures has shown that those who are deemed heroes act as symbols of contemporary values and ideals of the…
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SIMON STRICK, American Dolorologies: Pain, Sentimentalism, Biopolitics (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2014), 229 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 63.2 The idea of biopolitics, coined by Michel Foucault, and importantly developed further by Giorgio Agamben, Robert Esposito, and others, figures as a key concept for cultural studies and critical theory today. At the same time, it has…
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DOMINIK OHREM, ed., American Beasts: Perspectives on Animals, Animality and U.S. Culture, 1776-1920 (Berlin: Neofelis, 2017), 303 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 63.2 This collection of ten original articles plus introduction (an article on historiography in its own right) builds on and expands recent research in the field of Animal Studies or Human Animal Studies within…
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MARK L. LOUDEN, Pennsylvania Dutch: The Story of an American Language (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2016), 504 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 63.2
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Recent Trends in Early American Studies: A Review Essay JULIANA BARR and EDWARD COUNTRYMANN, eds., Contested Spaces of Early America (Philadelphia: U of Philadelphia P, 2014), 444 pp. STACY SCHIFF, The Witches: Salem, 1692 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2015), 512 pp. BENJAMIN C. RAY, Satan & Salem: The Witch-Hunt Crisis of 1692 (Charlottesville, VA: U…
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NADJA GERNALZICK and GABRIELE PISARZ-RAMIREZ, eds. Transmediality and Transculturality (Heidelberg: Winter, 2013), 444 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 63.3 As Nadja Gernalzick and Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez, the editors of the essay volume Transmediality and Transculturality, note in their preface, the notion of “transculturation” traces back to the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortíz’s 1940 study Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco…
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CHRISTIAN KLOECKNER, SIMONE KNEWITZ, and SABINE SIELKE, eds. Knowledge Landscapes North America (Heidelberg: Winter, 2016), 305 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 63.3 The recent endeavors of the Trump administration to instigate reforms regarding political, educational, and ecological programs (to put it very mildly), as well as its attempts to recalibrate what knowledge is and how knowledge…
Read More
RICHARD J. SCHNEIDER, Civilizing Thoreau: Human Ecology and the Emerging Social Sciences in the Major Works (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2016), 212 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies Thanks largely to the magnificent work of Robert Richardson (Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, 1986) and Robert Sattelmeyer (Thoreau’s Reading, 1988), Thoreauvians have for some time been…
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AMITAV GOSH, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2016), 176 pp. STEPHEN SIPERSTEIN, SHANE HALL, and STEPHANIE LEMENAGER, eds., Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities (London/New York: Routledge, 2017), 294 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 63.3 Despite its grave threat, climate change continues to be treated as…
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Alexa Weik von Mossner, Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative (Ohio State UP, 2017), 271 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 63.3 One oft-repeated tale from the American Civil War era has it that Abraham Lincoln greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as “the little woman who wrote the book…
Read More
Hubert Zapf, ed., Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2016), 715 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 63.3 Gathering together many of the most inspiring international ecocritics all in one volume, Zapf’s Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology amps up the volume for environmental humanities; indeed, this is easily one of the very…
Read More
SCOTT RICHARD LYONS, ed., The World, the Text, and the Indian: Global Dimensions of Native American Literature (Albany: State U of New York P, 2017), 330 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 63.3 The collection of critical essays The World, the Text, and the Indian edited by Scott Richard Lyons is a noteworthy contribution to the fields…
Read More
SHAMOON ZAMIR, The Gift of the Face: Portraiture and Time in Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2014), 334 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 63.3 By the time the first volume of Edward S. Curtis’s work on The North American Indian was published in 1907, the scholarly discourse…
Read More
MANUEL MENRATH, Mission Sitting Bull: Die Geschichte der katholischen Sioux (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2016), 372 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 63.3 In the course of approaching American history with the methods of New Western History, a rich body of studies has emerged that reveals the vastness of Native American experiences in a new distinctiveness. In his…
Read More
Hilary E. Wyss, English Letters and Indian Literacies: Reading, Writing, and New England Missionary Schools, 1750-1830 (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2012), 264 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 63.3 In recent years there has been a noteworthy increase in studies of Native America.[1] Like Drew Lopenzina’s Red Ink: Native Americans Picking up the Pen in the…
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HEINZ ICKSTADT, Aesthetic Innovation and the Democratic Principle: Essays on Twentieth-Century American Poetry and Fiction. Eds. Susanne Rohr, Peter Schneck, Sabine Sielke. Heidelberg: Winter, 2016. 402 pp. Amerikastudien/American Studies, 63.1 It may seem peculiar to spend the first two paragraphs of a relatively short book review on a preface to a collection of…
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CLARE HAYES-BRADY, The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace: Language, Identity, and Resistance (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 232 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 63.1 Clare Hayes-Brady’s provocative title disguises a very measured review of David Foster Wallace’s oeuvre. Hayes-Brady defines “failure” as “incompletion,” and uses the term in a broadly conceptual sense to…
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SASCHA PÖHLMANN, ed., Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon’s Counternarratives (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 379 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 63.1 Pynchon scholarship and scholars tend to echo the defining characteristics of the author at the center of their discipline, namely, paranoia and erudition. In other words, Pynchon’s paranoid texts often spawn paranoid readings, and his…
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SIRI HUSTVEDT, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 552 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 63.1 Siri Hustvedt’s sixth collection of essays, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, even deeper than her previous work, explores the gaps between…
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JOEL PFISTER, Surveyors of Customs: American Literature as Cultural Analysis (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016), 276 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 63.1 Joel Pfister’s Surveyors of Custom: American Literature as Cultural Analysis is a timely contribution to the current debate around critique and post-critique. In his monograph, Pfister makes the case for an understanding of…
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MATTHEW WILKENS, Revolution: The Event in Postwar Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2016), 176 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 63.1 Readers of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man will remember a pivotal scene in which the narrator—the Invisible Man of the title—witnesses an elderly black couple being evicted from their Harlem apartment. An angry crowd gathers.…
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EMILY PETERMANN, The Musical Novel: Imitation of Musical Structure, Performance, and Reception in Contemporary Fiction, (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014), 250 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 63.1 The descriptive structuralist semiotic analyses presented in this book evolved from discussions at the Word and Music Association Forum (WMAF; viii). The WMAF was formed in 2009…
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HABIBA IBRAHIM, Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism (Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 2012), 256pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies. 63.1 In his anthology Interracialism (2000), Werner Sollors diagnosed an “American exceptionalism” in the policing of racialized boundaries, a “300-year-long tradition” in which sexual and familial relations across the…
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HANNA WIRTH-NESHER, ed., The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature (New York: Cambridge UP, 2016), 732 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 63.1 This much-needed volume brings Jewish American literature as an ethnic literature back on the critical agenda. That the very concept should have almost vanished from the landscape of critical debates is noteworthy…
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MARK STOREY, Rural Fictions, Urban Realities: A Geography of Gilded Age American Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013), 208 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 63.1 Mark Storey’s study, Rural Fictions, Urban Realities, aims to read markers of modernity as “absent presences” (2) in a number of novels set in rural environments of the Gilded Age.…
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PHILIPP LÖFFLER, Pluralist Desires: Contemporary Historical Fiction and the End of the Cold War (Rochester: Camden House, 2015), 190 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 63.1 Philipp Löffler’s Pluralist Desires seeks to rethink historical fiction after the end of the Cold War. As Löffler argues, the novels he discusses share a belief that “when we…
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SYBILLE MACHAT, In the Ruins of Civilization: Narrative Structures, World Constructions and Physical Realities in the Post-Apocalyptic Novel (Trier: WVT, 2013), 330 pp. Amerikastudien/American Studies. 63.1 Contemporary culture is awash with images and narratives anticipating its own demise or, as the case may be, documenting its on-going decay. Scenarios depicting the aftermath of…
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SONJA SCHILLINGS, Enemies of All Humankind: Fictions of Legitimate Violence, Re-Mapping the Transnational: A Dartmouth Series in American Studies (Hanover: Dartmouth College P/UP of New England, 2016), 302 pp. Amerikastudien/American Studies, 63.1 Can acts of violence ever be legitimate, and how have claims of legitimate violence been theorized and represented in legal theory…
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ELIZABETH S. ANKER AND RITA FELSKI (eds.), Critique and Postcritique (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2017), 329 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 63.1 Another death of Theory? Another burial? Another entombment during which no one sheds a single tear and all one hears are listlessly uttered anecdotes, as well as some mumbled and incoherent obscenities?…
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Alfred Hornung, ed. Obama and Transnational American Studies (Heidelberg: Winter, 2016), 528 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.4 American Studies have come a long way, as have American politics. In a geopolitical sense, the new millennium began on September 11th 2001, a date that has been regarded as marking the end of the American…
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Brooke L. Blower and Mark Philip Bradley, eds., The Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts after the Transnational Turn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2015), 224 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.4 Over the past two decades the term, concept, and theoretical approach of transnationalism has been increasingly in vogue. “American studies has,” as…
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Udo J. Hebel, ed., Transnational American Studies (Heidelberg: Winter, 2012), American Studies Monograph Series, no. 222. 644 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.4 In his often-cited essay “Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism” Steven Vertovec broadly defined transnationalism in 1999 as the “multiple ties and interactions linking people or institutions across the borders of the nation-states”…
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Caroline Frank, Objectifying China, Imagining America: Chinese Commodities in Early America (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011), 257 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.4 According to data released by China and the U.S., by the end of 2015, the U.S. had become China’s second largest trading partner, its largest export market, and the fourth…
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Mark G. Spencer, ed., The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 2 vols., xxxvi + 1215 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.4 As to its scope, substance, and usability, this new reference work deserves nothing but praise. Interdisciplinary in perspective and over ten years in the making, The Bloomsbury…
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Peter Nicolaisen and Hannah Spahn, eds., Cosmopolitanism and Nationhood in the Age of Jefferson (Heidelberg: Winter, 2013), viii + 256pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.4 Die Aufsätze, die hier zusammengetragen sind, basieren auf einer Konferenz, die zusammen mit dem Robert J. Smith International Centre for Jefferson Studies in Charlottesville, VA, vom John F. Kennedy…
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Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, Transatlantic Crossings and Transformations: German-American Cultural Transfer from the 18th to the End of the 19th Century (Frankfurt am Máin: Lang, 2015), 418pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.4 Usually, book reviews evaluate whether a study provides an original, innovative, or new contribution to scholarship. However, Kurt Mueller-Vollmer’s book almost exclusively reprints chapters…
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Kendahl Radcliffe, Jennifer Scott, and Anja Werner, eds., Anywhere But Here: Black Intellectuals in the Atlantic World and Beyond (Jackson, Miss.: UP of Mississippi, 2015), 270 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.4 Fields as diverse as postcolonial studies, diaspora studies, African American studies, American studies, intellectual history, sociology, and rock music studies have been…
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Elisabeth Bronfen and Daniel Kampa, eds., Eine Amerikanerin in Hitlers Badewanne: Drei Frauen berichten über den Krieg; Margaret Bourke-White, Lee Miller und Martha Gellhorn (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 2015), 360 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.4 Eine Amerikanerin in Hitlers Badewanne [An American Woman in Hitler’s Bathtub] features an intriguing collection of photographs and German…
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Katja Kurz, Narrating Contested Lives: The Aesthetics of Life Writing in Human Rights Campaigns (Heidelberg: Winter, 2015), 271 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.4 More than any other genre, life writing illustrates the interdependence of narrative strategies and cultural understandings of selfhood and recognition. Selves are performed narratively, through memories pieced together anew…
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Markus Nehl, Transnational Black Dialogues: Re-Imagining Slavery in the Twenty-First Century (Bielefeld: transcript, 2016), 212 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.4 ‘Postslavery Studies’ might be a more appropriate denominator for this relevant study that appeared in Transcript’s Postcolonial Studies series and focusses on the ways in which “second generation neo-slave narratives” (32) address the…
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Wilfried Raussert, The Routledge Companion to Inter-American Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), xv, 444 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.4 Inter-American or Hemispheric (American) Studies is one of the fields in the wider context of Cultural Studies, Area Studies, or Transnational (American) Studies that has rapidly evolved in recent decades to encompass…
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Winfried Siemerling, The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: Black Canadian Writing, Cultural History, and the Presence of the Past (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2015), 560 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.3 With his Black Atlantic Reconsidered, Winfried Siemerling has produced a necessary milestone for Black Canadian studies and, possibly, has written his magnum opus. The recipient of…
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Kristina Graaff, Street Literature: Black Popular Fiction in the Era of U.S. Mass Incarceration (Heidelberg: Winter, 2015), 274 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.3 In the late 1990s, street literature novels emerged in urban areas in the United States and have since risen to popularity particularly among African Americans. So far, this kind of popular fiction…
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Florian Bast, Of Bodies, Communities, and Voices: Agency in Writings by Octavia Butler, (Heidelberg: Winter, 2015), 221 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.3 In April 2014, the Guardian caused a stir by announcing that two previously unpublished stories—a novella entitled “A Necessary Being” and a short story, “Childminder”—had been found among notes and papers at a…
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Stella Bolaki and Sabine Broeck, eds, Audre Lorde’s Transnational Legacies (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2015), Xii + 250 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.3 Audre Lorde’s Transnational Legacies is a collection of essays edited by Stella Bolaki and Sabrine Broeck in a transnational effort to show how the African American poet Audre Lorde’s (1934-1992) influential…
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Stefanie Mueller, The Presence of the Past in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Heidelberg: Winter, 2013), 270 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.3 In Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007), Saidiya Hartman offers an insightful rumination on the ongoing structural and personal effects of slavery in the wake of the transatlantic…
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Michele Elam, ed., The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin (New York: Cambridge UP, 2015), 246 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.3 In the last twenty years, the major influence of theoretical frameworks such as the “Black Atlantic”[1] and the “Black Diaspora”[2] has led to the transformation of African American Studies to a more internationally oriented academic…
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Werner Sollors, African American Writing: A Literary Approach (Philadelphia, PA: Temple U P, 2016), 296 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.3 African American Writing, Werner Sollors’s latest book, commands attention for a variety of reasons: as a compilation of previously published essays, it brings to light within the covers of one single book the astounding scope,…
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Christina Schäffer, The Brownies’ Book: Inspiring Racial Pride in African-American Children, Mainzer Studien zur Amerikanistik 60 (Frankfurt et. al: Peter Lang, 2012), 536 pp. Gary D. Schmidt, Making Americans: Children’s Literature from 1930 to 1960 (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2013), 318 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.3 Christina Schäffer’s The Brownies’ Book and Gary…
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Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York and London: New York UP, 2011), 307 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.3 The idea of childhood innocence has become a naturalized element of discussions over race and rights, and, as Robin Bernstein shows in her discussion of Keith Bardwell, a justice…
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Christine Knauer, Let Us Fight as Free Men: Black Soldiers and Civil Rights (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2014), 337 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.3 Christine Knauer’s Let Us Fight as Free Men is a welcome addition to the growing body of historical scholarship on African American soldiers and the role of war and black…
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Amy Kate Bailey, Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2015), 276 pp. Tameka Bradley Hobbs, Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida (Tallahassee: UP of Florida, 2015), 273 pp. Manfred Berg, Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2011),…
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Marcel Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten Slaves: Two Hundred Years of Bondage, Transl. George Tombs (Montréal: Véhicule Press, 2013), 323 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.3 George Tombs’s 2013 English translation of Marcel Trudel’s Deux siècles d’esclavage au Québec (2009) was fifty years overdue. Trudel’s magnum opus first appeared in 1960 under the title L’esclavage au Canada français…
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Maria Loeschnigg, The Contemporary Canadian Short Story in English: Continuity and Change. CAT 7 (Trier: WVT, 2014), 381 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.2 In spite of pessimistic forecasts regarding the future development of the Canadian short story by the Literary History of Canada in 1965,[1] the genre has flourished in the intervening decades since the…
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Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergmann. Eds. Liminality and the Short Story: Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian, and British Writing (New York: Routledge, 2015), 282 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.2 The concept of liminality is rather expansive, a fact that many of the contributors to Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergmann’s collection tend to convey. Predicated in…
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Robert Paul Lamb, The Hemingway Short Story: A Study in Craft for Writers and Readers (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015), 233 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.2 The professional study of literature places demands on scholars that are not required of casual readers, who are free to read as quickly or inventively as they…
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Frank Gado, ed., William Cullen Bryant: The Complete Stories (Hartford, Vt.: Antoka Press: 2014) 327pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.2 In many respects, Bryant has become a shadowy figure in the American literary canon. Students in academic classes may encounter “Thanatopsis,” but few others from Bryant’s verse output. They are even less likely to find specimens…
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Paul Stephens, The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2015), 241 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.2 As the digital media affect ever greater portions of everyday life, scholarly interest in their impact on cultural production has increased as well. Poetry is not usually associated with technological…
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Simone Knewitz, Modernist Authenticities: The Material Body and the Poetics of Amy Lowell and William Carlos Williams (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014), 249 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.2 Within the larger context of modernism, the complex relationship between the material body and poetic expression is one of two analytical foci of Simone Knewitz’s study. In order to…
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ANDREW S. GROSS, The Pound Reaction: Liberalism and Lyricism in Midcentury American Literature (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2015) Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.2 This book on the reactions to Ezra Pound’s Bollingen Award has itself won a prize, the Rob Kroes Publication Award by the European Association of American Studies. Since one of the effects of reading…
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Sascha Pöhlmann, Future-Founding Poetry: Topographies of Beginnings from Whitman to the Twenty-First Century, European Studies in North American Literature and Culture (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2015), 424 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.2 Sascha Pöhlmann’s study of American poetry belongs to a currently growing body of scholarly works partaking in a ‘temporal turn’ in literary and…
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Mark Noble, American Poetic Materialism: From Whitman to Stevens, New York, NY: Cambridge UP, 2015. 242 pp. Paul Mariani, The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2016. 496 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.2 Wallace Stevens’s poetry has frequently been regarded as philosophical[1] and used to support claims…
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Marcus Münch, Building New Faith on New-Found Shores: Die religiöse Dimension in der Dichtung der Fireside Poets (Trier: WVT, 2016), 239 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.2 Marcus Münch’s study of the “religious dimension” in the poetical works of William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes takes as its theoretical…
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Courtney Q. Shah, Sex Ed, Segregated: The Quest for Sexual Knowledge in Progressive-Era America (Rochester: The U of Rochester P, 2015), 228 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.1 In Sex Ed, Segregated, Courtney Q. Shah examines the early twentieth-century sexual education movement in the United States by exposing the debates surrounding sex ed and curriculum…
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Pekka Hämäläinen. The Comanche Empire. (New Haven: Yale UP, 2008), 512 pages. Gail D. MacLeitch. Imperial Entanglements: Iroquois Change and Persistence on the Frontiers of Empire. (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2011), 344 pages. Karl-Hermann Hörner. Die Natchez: Staatenbildung am unteren Mississippi? (Neckenmarkt: Novum Pro, 2011), 238 pages. Andrew H. Fisher. Shadow Tribe: The Making…
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Elizabeth L. Wollmann, Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013), 271 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.1 In Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City untersucht Elizabeth Wollman eine Untergattung des amerikanischen Musicals, die Musicalkenner meistens nur von ihrem verruchten Ruf her kennen und die…
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Daniel Stein, Music Is My Life: Louis Armstrong, Autobiography and American Jazz, Jazz Perspectives (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2012), 349 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.1 Based on his award-winning dissertation, Daniel Stein’s book is a timely and innovative addition to the vast amount of scholarly literature on Louis Armstrong. It is a…
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Rauhut, Michael. Ein Klang Zwei Welten – Blues im geteilten Deutschland, 1945 bis 1990 (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2016), 366 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.1 This book is the latest addition to Michael Rauhut’s series of publications on the topic of Blues and popular music in cold-war Germany. In contrast to most of the author’s…
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Anja Schäfers, “Mehr als Rock ‘n’ Roll: Der Radiosender AFN Mitte der Sechziger Jahre” Transatlantische Historische Studien 52. Ed. Hartmut Berghoff, Clelia Caruso, and Mischa Honeck. (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2014), 454 S. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.1 In ihrem Buch über den US-amerikanischen Radiosender AFN (American Forces Network) untersucht Anja Schäfers dessen Geschichte überaus…
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Stefan Pavenzinger, The Voice of America. Die gesellschaftspolitische Vermittlerfunktion Johnny Cashs 1963-1972. (Trier: WVT, 2012), 408 pages. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.1 Johnny Cash ist eine der herausragenden Künstlerpersönlichkeiten des 20. Jahrhunderts. Seine Jahrhundertstimme, der unverwechselbare Sound und ein Songrepertoire, das die Geschichten des Lebens und des Landes erzählt, haben den 2003 verstorbenen Country-Sänger zu…
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Barry Shank, The Political Force of Musical Beauty. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 344 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.1 The intricate relationship between popular music and politics has been the subject of much scholarship since the 1960s. Civil rights songs, Riot Grrrl punk music and conscious rap, among many others, have been the…
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Amato, Viola (†). Intersex Narratives: Shifts in the Representation of Intersex Lives in Northern American Literature and Popular Culture. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2016. 304pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.1 The success of Jeffrey Eugenides’s 2003 novel Middlesex directed attention to intersex as a topic in American Studies. At the time of its publication, this coming of…
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Jonathan Kirshner, Hollywood’s Last Golden Age: Politics, Society, and the Seventies Film in America (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2012), 280 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.1 The 1970s are a truly legendary time in US history. Hardly any other period is so richly filled with the political and social changes that are crucial to the formation…
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Wieland Schwanebeck, Der flexible Mr. Ripley. Männlichkeit und Hochstapelei in Literatur und Film (Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau, 2014), 391 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.1 Forgeries and fakes, Martin Doll observes, do not imitate originals but the attributions and attribution systems that define what counts as an original in a given historical and discursive context.[1]…
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Vanessa Künnemann, Middlebrow Mission: Pearl Buck’s American China (Bielefield: transcript, 2015), 283 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.1 In an age when academic research suffers from information overload and attention deficit, we welcome studies that offer bird’s-eye-view perspectives of the present moment, or that make bold theoretical interventions. Yet we cannot do without projects that…
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Judith Kohlenberger, The New Formula For Cool: Science, Technology, and the Popular in the American Imagination (Bielefeld: transcript, 2015), 345pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 62.1 In American Cool, Peter Stearns famously calls “cool” a “distinctly American” concept, which “permeates almost every aspect of contemporary American culture” and has “seized a central place in the American…
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