WILLIAM EARL WEEKS, The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, Vol. 1: Dimensions of the Early American Empire, 1754-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013), 336 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 60.2/3 The 4-volume Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations—written by leading scholars in the field—has been a knowledgeable, readable, reliable, and useful introduction to…
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JAMES NAGEL, The American Short Story Handbook (Malden, MA; Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 315 pp. Amerikastudien/American Studies 60.2/3 This book is part of the Wiley Blackwell Literature Handbooks-series, which, as the blurb reads, “offers the student thorough and lively introductions to literary periods, movements, and, in some instances, authors and genres [. . .]…
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ALFRED BENDIXEN and STEPHEN BURT, eds. The Cambridge History of American Poetry (New York: Cambridge UP, 2015), 1326 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 60.2/3 As Alfred Bendixen and Stephen Burt note in their introduction to The Cambridge History of American Poetry, there have been “surprisingly few attempts to provide a literary history of poetry…
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CARY NELSON, The Oxford Handbook to Modern American Poetry (New York: Oxford UP, 2012), 716 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 60.2/3 Cary Nelson’s Oxford Handbook to Modern American Poetry is in many ways the companion piece to his Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2000), which was republished as a two volume edition…
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AUDRA SIMPSON and ANDREA SMITH, eds. Theorizing Native Studies (Durham & London: Duke UP, 2014), pp. 337. JAMES H. COX and DANIEL HEATH JUSTICE, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature (Oxford & New York: Oxford UP, 2014), pp. 741. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 60.2/3 Both Theorizing Native Studies and The Oxford Handbook…
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CHRISTOF MAUCH UND RÜDIGER B. WERISCH (Hg.; unter Mitarbeit v. Angelika Möller), USA-Lexikon. Schlüsselbegriffe zu Politik, Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft, Kultur, Geschichte und zu den deutsch-amerikanischen Beziehungen (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2013), 1334 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 60.2/3 Nachdem das von Rüdiger Wersich herausgegebene USA-Lexikon Mitte der 1990er Jahre erstmals publiziert worden war, konnte es…
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Bill Hardwig, Upon Provincialism: Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870-1900 (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2013), 184 pp. Mark J. Noonan, Reading the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine: American Literature and Culture, 1870-1893 (Kent: KentState UP, 2010), 235 pp. Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, Christoph Irmscher, eds., Cultural Circulation: Dialogues between Canada and the American South, Sitzungsberichte der…
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PAUL GILES, Antipodean America: Australasia and the Constitution of U.S. Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 575 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 60.2/3 In this impressive study of the pervasive yet often neglected literary and cultural relationships between the United States and Australasia, Paul Giles takes readers on a tour beginning with Benjamin Franklin’s satires…
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ALFRED HORNUNG and MARTINA KOHL, eds., Arab American Literature and Culture (Heidelberg: Winter, 2012), 299 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 60.2/3 The tragic attacks of 9/11 have reshaped global and local relationships and have directly affected Arab communities scattered throughout the United States, resulting in two new opposite phenomena: the growing senses of venom,…
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STEFAN HIRT, Adolf Hitler in American Culture: National Identity and the Totalitarian Other (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2013), 652 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 60.2/3 Stefan Hirt’s book Adolf Hitler in American Culture: National Identity and the Totalitarian Other is a far-ranging and ambitious work that tries to explain not only the evolution of Adolf…
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STEPHEN KALBERG, Deutschland und Amerika aus der Sicht Max Webers (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2013), 236 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 60.2/3 Ever since he submitted his dissertation on Max Weber in 1978, Stephen Kalberg, who teaches sociological theory at Boston University, has produced a continuous flow of studies on Weber’s work. An appendix in the…
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HERMANN WELLENREUTHER, Citizens in a Strange Land: A Study of German-American Broadsides and their Meaning for Germans in North America, 1730-1830 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 384 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 60.2/3 Hermann Wellenreuther, writing about the experience of Pennsylvania Germans in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, notes that “the…
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MARTIN PAUL EVE, Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno (Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillian, 2014), 229 pp. LUC HERMAN and STEVEN WEISENBURGER, Gravity’s Rainbow, Domination and Freedom (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 258 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 60.2/3 As if already prematurely preparing for the slowly approaching semi-centennial anniversary of the publication of Thomas…
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MIRIAM KUROSZCZYK, Poetic Brokers: Robert Hayden, Melvin B. Tolson, and International Modernism in African American Poetry ( Trier: wvt, 2013, Mosaic: Studien und Texte zur amerikanischen Kultur und Geschichte 47), 193 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 60.2/3 This dissertation sets out to correct race-based misconceptions regarding the poetics and the sociopolitical perspectives of two African…
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ANNE-MARIE SCHOLZ, From Fidelity to History. Film Adaptations as Cultural Events in the Twentieth Century (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013), 227pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 60.2/3 2013 has been a highly productive year for adaptation studies and has seen a number of publications addressing a broad spectrum of aspects of this field…
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CORNELIS A. VAN MINNEN AND MANFRED BERG, The U. S. South and Europe: Transatlantic Relations in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013), 316 pp. Amerikastudien/American Studies 60.2/3 If ever scholars saw the southern United States as an isolated region preoccupied with parochial concerns, the edited volume The U. S.…
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JENNA M. GIBBS, Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760-1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014), 313 pp. Amerikastudien/American Studies 60.2/3 Over the last two decades, theater scholars such as Joseph Roach, Peter Reed, and Jeffrey Richards have studied early American theatrical culture as part of a circum-…
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Jennifer Clark, The American Idea of England, 1776-1840: Transatlantic Writing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 232 pp. Amerikastudien/American Studies 60.2/3 In just a few words, Jennifer Clark succinctly expresses the guiding assumption of her monograph claiming that “[i]f the lines between American and English culture were blurred, the political differences were sharp and always in focus” (157).…
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