The Complicity of Imagination examines the rich and complex relationship among four nineteenth-century authors and the culture and politics of seventeenth-century England. This study portrays an American Renaissance whose writers were deeply enough read in the literature and controversies of seventeenth-century England to appropriate its cultural artifacts for their own purposes. By exploring the broader cultural implications of intertextual relationships, this book demonstrates how literary texts participate in the artistic, political, and theological tensions within American culture.

Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem is a critical and historical interpretation of "Oriental" influences on American modernist poetry. Kern equates Fenollosa and Pound's "discovery" of Chinese writing with the American pursuit of a natural language for poetry, what Emerson had termed the "language of nature." Through analysis and contextualization, Kern sheds light on the three contemporary nexuses of his search: the cultural study of Orientalism and the West, the evolution of Indo-European linguistic theory, and the intellectual tradition of American modernist poetry.

Arguing for a fundamental reassessment of the literary history of the nineteenth-century United States within transamerican and multilingual contexts, Anna Brickhouse examines a broad array of texts in English, French, and Spanish. She discovers literary influences from Latin American and Caribbean American literatures which made the period a rich era of literary border-crossing and transcontinental cultural exchange.

The Catholic Side of Henry James is the first to reveal the profound Catholic imagery in James' work. Edwin Fussell argues that Henry James, though not a "card-carrying" Catholic, was a fellow-traveling Catholic of a certain literary type. Fussell is not trying to turn James into a Closet Catholic but is, rather, intent on questioning conventional critical assumptions about James' unquestioned secularity. He contends that the writer's career began with narratives of Catholic conversion and ended with his masterpiece of Catholic eccentricity and alienation, The Golden Bowl. With an enormously...

John McWilliams' book is an ambitious attempt to review New England history and literature from the Puritans through the Revolutionary period to the antebellum era. McWilliams demonstrates how successive narratives of crises, real or imagined, reflected historical realities which proved adaptable to later settlers. Offering an all-encompassing narrative of one crucial region in the American literary and historical experience, he brings to light new contexts for understanding crucial events in early American literature and history.

McWilliams shows how and why the epic had to be transformed from imitative narrative poetry into new, open genres.

Charles Altieri's book sets modernist American poetry in a precise cultural context.

Cary Wolfe analyses the dynamics and consequences of radical individualism and the sort of cultural critique it generates in Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ezra Pound.

Elisa New presents a major revision of the accepted account of Emerson as the source of the American poetic tradition.

A whole range of major American writers have focused on images of the household, of domestic virtue, and the feminine or feminized hero.