Category: Volume 59.2 (2014)

REINER SMOLINSKI and JAN STIEVERMANN, eds., Cotton Mather and Biblia Americana – America’s First Bible Commentary: Essays in Reappraisal (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck and Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic 2010), 593 pp. Reviewed by Tibor Fabiny Amerikastudien / American Studies 59.2 (2014) Written between 1693 and 1728, Biblia Americana, the longest book of the most prolific American Puritan…

EDWARD WATTS and DAVID J. CARLSON, eds., John Neal and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2012), xxxiv + 319 pp. Reviewed by Klaus H. Schmidt Amerikastudien / American Studies 59.2 (2014) In many a review, claiming the importance of the volume under discussion is little more than a rhetorical strategy. In the case of…

PHILIP F. GURA, Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 352 pp. Reviewed by Philipp Schweighauser Amerikastudien / American Studies 59.2 (2014) When Philip F. Gura, the author of Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical (2005) and editor of Early American Literature, publishes a book subtitled “The Rise of the…

FRANÇOIS SPECQ, LAURA DASSOW WALLS, and MICHEL GRANGER, eds., Thoreauvian Modernities: Transatlantic Conversations on an American Icon (Athens: U of Georgia P, 2013), 310 pp. Reviewed by Johannes Voelz Amerikastudien / American Studies 59.2 (2014) In June 2009, Thoreau scholars from the United States and Europe (mostly France) convened in Lyon—“the first ever such meeting on European…

SUSANNE ROHR and MIRIAM STRUBE, eds., Revisiting Pragmatism: William James in the New Millennium (Heidelberg: Winter, 2012), 233 pp. Reviewed by Martin Klepper Amerikastudien / American Studies 59.2 (2014) It is true, as Susanne Rohr and Miriam Strube suggest in the introduction to this volume, that American pragmatism in general and William James in particular still…

KATHRYN HUME, Aggressive Fiction: Reading the Contemporary American Novel (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2012), 200 + xiii pp. Reviewed by Birgit Däwes Amerikastudien / American Studies 59.1 (2014) When Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho was published in 1991, Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley called it “a contemptible piece of pornography, the literary equivalent of a snuff flick.”…

MIRIAM B. MANDEL, ed., Hemingway and Africa (Rochester: Camden House, 2011), 426 pp. Reviewed by Nicole J. Camastra Amerikastudien / American Studies 59.2 (2014) Despite Ernest Hemingway’s discovery of Africa as an adult, he connected the continent to the importance of childhood in the writer’s imagination. For example, his protagonist of the posthumously published The Garden of…

SEBASTIAN M. HERRMANN, CAROLIN ALICE HOFMANN, KATJA KANZLER, and FRANK USBECK, eds., Participating Audiences, Imagined Public Spheres: The Cultural Work of Contemporary American(ized) Narratives (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2012), 172 pp. Reviewed by Michael Butter Amerikastudien / American Studies 59.2 (2014) The volume under review synthesizes two highly productive research paradigms that have informed much work in…

ULFRIED REICHARDT, Globalisierung: Literaturen und Kulturen des Globalen (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2010), 252 pp. Reviewed by Sigrun Meinig Amerikastudien / American Studies 59.2 (2014) In dem Studienbuch Globalisierung: Literaturen und Kulturen des Globalen von Ulfried Reichardt bringt das im Zentrum stehende Phänomen eine spezifische Perspektive mit sich. Diese liegt in “ [der] entscheidende[n] Einsicht […], dass…