Dos Passos and the Ideology of the Feminine is an original contribution to traditional Dos Passos scholarship, which tends to focus on the author's political agenda. In this book, Janet Casey takes a cultural studies approach that situates both the author and his finest fiction in relation to representations and theorizations of gender in the 1920s and 1930s. Its primary focus is the manner in which Dos Passos responds to prevalent ideas about the feminine, as well as the way that such ideas have affected his ongoing reputation.

Kenneth Asher examines the influence of French reactionary thinking on Eliot's prose and poetry and argues that this political inheritance provided the intellectual framework Eliot employed throughout his career.

Edith Wharton emerges in this book as a novelist of morals (rather than manners). Behind her polished portraits of upper-class New York life is a thoughtful, questioning spirit. This book analyzes Wharton's religion and philosophy in short stories and seven major novels. It considers Wharton in terms of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American intellectual and religious life. It also analyzes Wharton in terms of her gender and class, explaining how this aristocratic woman applies and yet transforms both the classical and Christian traditions that she inherits.

Jeffrey Hammond's study of the funeral elegies of early New England reassesses a body of poems whose importance in their own time has been obscured by almost total neglect in ours. Hammond reconstructs the historical, theological and cultural contexts of these poems to demonstrate how they responded to Puritan views on a specific process of mourning. The elegies emerge, he argues, as performative scripts that consoled readers by shaping their experience. They shed new light on the emotional dimension of Puritanism and the important role of ritual in Puritan culture.

Focusing on key works of late-nineteenth and early- twentieth-century American literary realism, Phillip Barrish traces the emergence of new ways of gaining intellectual prestige--that is, new ways of gaining some degree of cultural recognition. Through extended readings of works by Henry James, William Dean Howells, Abraham Cahan, and Edith Wharton, Barrish emphasizes the differences between realist modes of cultural authority and those associated with the rise of the social sciences.

As a central icon of political and cultural democracy, the crowd occupies a prominent place in the American literary and cultural landscape. Mary Esteve examines a range of writing by Poe, Hawthorne, Du Bois, James, and Stephen Crane to provide a study of crowd representations in American literature from the antebellum era to the early twentieth century. She argues that these writers examined the aesthetic and political meanings of urban crowd scenes.

Why did the figure of "the girl" come to dominate the American imagination from the middle of the nineteenth century into the twentieth? Peter Stoneley looks at how women were fictionalized for the girl reader as ways of achieving a powerful social and cultural presence. Covering a wide range of works and writers, this book is of interest to cultural and literary scholars.

Ralph Bauer presents a comparative investigation of colonial prose narratives in Spanish and British America from 1542 to 1800. Bauer analyzes narratives of shipwreck, captivity, and travel, as well as imperial and natural histories of the New World in the context of transformative early modern scientific ideologies. He reviews the narrative models promoted by the "New Sciences" during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries within the context of the geopolitical question of how knowledge can be centrally controlled in outwardly expanding empires.

Race, Work and Desire analyses literary representations of work relationships across the colour-line from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Michele Birnbaum examines inter-racial bonds in fiction and literary correspondence by black and white authors and artists - including Elizabeth Keckley, Frances E. W. Harper, W. D. Howells, Grace King, Kate Chopin, Langston Hughes, Amy Spingarn and Carl Van Vechten - exploring the way servants and employers, doctors and patients, and patrons and artists negotiate their racial differences for artistic and political ends. Situating...

Richard Grusin's innovative study investigates how the establishment of national parks contributed to the development of American national identity after the Civil War. Although parks are seen as an uncomplicated means of environmental preservation, Grusin argues that they must also be understood as complex cultural technologies dedicated to the reproduction of nature as landscape art. He explores the origins of America's three major parks--Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Grand Canyon--in relationship to other forms of landscape representation, including photography, mapping, travel writing and...