Category: American Literature

ELIZABETH MADDOCK DILLON, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1949-1849 (Durham and London: Duke UP, 2014), 368 pp.   Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 61.1   In New World Drama, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon aims at nothing less than a conceptual and methodological re-conceptualization of early American theatre and drama. Her study critically addresses, challenges,…

CLAUDIA HOLLER AND MARTIN KLEPPER, EDS., Re-Thinking Narrative Identity (Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2013), 209 pp.   Amerikastudien/ American Studies 61.1     The concept of narrative identity has made a remarkable career in the past few decades. Philosophers, psychologists, and literary scholars as diverse as Paul Ricoeur, Donald Polkinghorne, and Paul John Eakin have…

CHRISTINE MARKS, “I Am because You Are”: Relationality in the Works of Siri Hustvedt (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014), 234 pp.   Amerikastudien/ American Studies 61.1   In her study “I Am because You Are”: Relationality in the Works of Siri Hustvedt (2014), Christine Marks analyzes Hustvedt’s fictional and non-fictional works, including the latest novel The Blazing…

BIRGIT M. BAURIDL, Betwixt, Between, or Beyond? Negotiating Transformations from the Liminal Sphere of Contemporary Black Performance Poetry (Heidelberg: Winter, 2013), 326 pp.   Amerikastudien/ American Studies 61.1   Representing the “first study of contemporary black performance poetry from the viewpoint of transnational American Studies” (back cover), Birgit Bauridl’s Betwixt, Between, or Beyond? pursues two…

MATTHEW STRATTON, The Politics of Irony in American Modernism (New York: Fordham UP, 2013), 304 pp.   Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 61.1   We live in a post-ironic age, or so much contemporary criticism would have us believe. Ironically enough, however, as Matthew Stratton points out in The Politics of Irony in American Modernism, the discourse…

JAMES NAGEL, Race and Culture in New Orleans Stories: Kate Chopin, Grace King, Alice Dunbar-Nelson & George Washington Cable (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2014), 208 pp.   Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 61.1   James Nagel, a prolific scholar with many books on nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction to his credit, among them a monograph on contemporary…

GARY SCHARNHORST ED., Twain in His Own Time (Iowa City, U of Iowa P, 2010), 348 pp.   Amerikastudien/ American Studies 61.1   The anthology Twain in His Own Time is the first volume of a series called Writers in Their Own Time edited by the eminent scholar Joel Myerson. The series has so far…

BABETTE BÄRBEL TISCHLEDER, The Literary Life of Things. Case Studies in American Fiction (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2014), 292 pp.   Amerikastudien/ American Studies 61.1   Of the current scholarship driving the material turn in literary studies, Babette Tischleder’s The Literary Life of Things is a major contribution to critical efforts intent on disentangling the complicated…

KRISTEN CASE, American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012), xv + 160 pp.   Amerikastudien/ American Studies 61.1   In her study of “the seeds” (xi and xii) and “the echoes of pragmatist thinking” (xiii) in American poetry, Kristen Case traces parallels in the ways that…

SABINA MATTER-SEIBEL, Contending Forces: Romantraditionen amerikanischer Schriftstellerinnen 1850-1900, Mainzer Studien zur Amerikanistik 61 (Frankfurt et. al: Peter land, 2013), 622 pp.   Amerikastudien/ American Studies 61.1   Mit Contending Forces: Romantraditionen amerikanischer Schriftstellerinnen 1850-1900 hat Sabina Matter-Seibel einen längst fälligen Beitrag zur Erforschung des sentimentalen Genre in der Frauenliteratur vorgelegt. Im Fokus ihrer Untersuchung stehen…

LAWRENCE BUELL, The Dream of the Great American Novel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2014), xii + 567 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 61.1   Debates around the Great American Novel (GAN) have been going on for a century and a half, with periods of greater or lesser efflorescence. We are now in a time of heightened…

THOMAS DIKANT, Landschaft und Territorium: Amerikanische Literatur, Expansion und die Krise der Nation, 1784-1866 (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2014), 250 pp.   Amerikastudien/ American Studies 61.1   “The geographic fantasies pursued in U.S. literature,” Jennifer Rae Greeson has written in Our South, “have not been simply ‘superstructural’ window dressing for the real operation of power in…

HEINZ TSCHACHLER, The Monetary Imagination of Edgar Allan Poe: Banking, Currency and Politics in the Writings (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2013), 230 pp.   Amerikastudien/American Studies 61.1   In order to prove “that the writings and career of Edgar Allan Poe cannot be separated from the world of banking and finance in antebellum America”…