Reviews

  Austenfeld, Thomas (Ed.). Robert Lowell in a New Century: European and American Perspectives. Suffolk: Camden House, 2019. ISBN 9781640140288. £71.65 (hardback). 206pp. In his introduction to Rober... Read More...

Sawires-Masseli, Marie-Christin. Arab American Novels Post-9/11: Classical Storytelling Motifs against Outsidership. Universitätsverlag Winter, 2018. (Volume 293 of American Studies) ISBN 978-3825369217. €45 (... Read More...

Schmidt, Christian. Postblack Aesthetics: The Freedom to be Black in Contemporary African American Fiction. Universitätsverlag Winter, 2017 (Volume 256 of American Studies). ISBN 9783825374914. €45 (Hardback). ... Read More...

Leopold Lippert, Performing America Abroad: Transnational Cultural Politics in the Age of Neoliberal Capitalism. Universitätsverlag Winter, 2018. Leopold Lippert’s Performing America Abroad provides a survey... Read More...

Kloeckner, Christian, Simone Knewitz, and Sabine Sielke, editors. Knowledge Landscapes North America. Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016. Data explosions and information revolutions have made news on both sides... Read More...

T. H. Breen, The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019. That revolutions generally end very badly is a truth generally (i... Read More...

Andy Connolly. Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition. Lexington Books, 2017. The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in November 2016 has proved a happy event for fiction. Thi... Read More...

Jutta Ernst, Sabina Matter-Siebel, and Klaus H. Schmidt, editors. Revisionist Approaches to American Realism and Naturalism. Universitätsverlag Winter, 2018. Using “revisionist” in the title of a text is som... Read More...

Bernice M. Murphy. Key Concepts in Contemporary Popular Fiction. Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Students and academics always need keywords and concise definitions for the everyday concepts they refer to,... Read More...

Lewis, Michael J. City of Refuge: Separatists and Utopian Town Planning. Princeton UP, 2016. There are rare instances when historical scholarship gains relevance in the immediate present. Michael Lewis’ book... Read More...

Hidalga, Jesús Blanco. Jonathan Franzen and the Romance of Community: Narratives of Salvation. Bloomsbury, 2017. Jonathan Franzen has written five novels, published a number of non-fiction collections, and i... Read More...

Lundy, Eileen T.,  and Edward J. Lundy, editors. Practicing Transnationalism: American Studies in the Middle East. U of Texas P, 2016. Practicing Transnationalism: American Studies in the Middle East offers ... Read More...

Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera. After American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism. Routledge, 2018. On the 1st of October 2018, Linda Dwire found herself in the news when she reportedly h... Read More...

Laurence W. Mazzeno and Sue Norton, eds. European Perspectives on John Updike. Camden House, 2018. European Perspectives on John Updike presents twelve chapters arranged in four parts. These are preceded by ... Read More...

Joe B. Fulton. Mark Twain Under Fire: Reception and Reputation, Criticism and Controversy 1851-2015. Camden House, 2018. With his latest publication, Mark Twain Under Fire, Joe B. Fulton has added significan... Read More...

Samuele F. S. Pardini. In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen. Dartmouth College Press, 2017. If there is one thing that we... Read More...

Leeds, Marc. The Vonnegut Encyclopedia. Revised and updated ed., Delacorte, 2016. The novels, plays and short stories of Kurt Vonnegut can be said to constitute a complex, interconnected fictive universe. Ch... Read More...

Gersdorf, Catrin, and Juliane Braun, eds. America After Nature: Democracy, Culture, Environment. Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016. American Studies 270. What is the State of the Union, what the state of US-Amer... Read More...

Teaford, Jon C. The Twentieth-Century American City: Problem, Promise and Reality. 3rd ed. John Hopkins UP, 2016. The title of the third edition of Jon C. Teaford’s study of the American metropolis, The 20th... Read More...

Burt, Stephen. the poem is you: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them. The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2016. 432 pages. ISBN 9780674737877. Buy here. Over the course of any given year, I recei... Read More...

Mac Donnell, Kevin, and R. Kent Rasmussen, eds. Mark Twain and Youth: Studies in His Life and Writings. Bloomsbury, 2016. The recent emergence of Mark Twain’s discussion-style autobiography has helped to pre... Read More...

Ellerhoff, Steve Gronert. Post-Jungian Psychology and the Short Stories of Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut. Routledge, 2016. Steve Gronert Ellerhoff’s incisive exploration of the short fiction of Kurt Vonnegu... Read More...

Matterson, Stephen. Melville: Fashioning in Modernity. Bloomsbury, 2014. Melville: Fashioning in Modernity is an exploration of Melville’s representations of selfhood, identity and self-fashioning in moderni... Read More...

Clarke, Edward. The Later Affluence of W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens Edward Clarke’s The Later Affluence of W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens offers a refreshing and risky reading of these poets’ last poems... Read More...

Downey, Dara. American Women's Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Critics of American gothic fiction often have noted something exceptional about U.S. horror.  A common position holds... Read More...

Jenkins, Lee M. The American Lawrence. University Press of Florida, 2015. Lee M. Jenkins’s The American Lawrence is an arresting book. The title is printed in a stylised font that invokes the ‘Wanted’ poster... Read More...

Kevin J. Hayes, A Journey Through American Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. A blurb on the back cover of Kevin J. Hayes’s A Journey Through American Literature describes the book as “like chatting with a o... Read More...

Lawrence P. Jackson, The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011. Lawrence P. Jackson’s The Indignant Generation provides a... Read More...

Amy Hungerford, Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion Since 1960. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010. In recent years there has been a growing interest in finding new approaches to the relationship ... Read More...

“[…] the many genres of grief underscore the magnitude of the challenge of making death meaningful, as the unique and individual nature of loss runs up against the dominant conventions that shape memorial traditions and practices” (4).

Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Alma López, eds., Our Lady of Controversy: Alma López’s Irreverent Apparition. Austin: U of Texas P, 2011. In 2001, Alma López’s digital collage, Our Lady appeared in an exhibition at... Read More...

Edward Ragg, Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. The question of abstraction in Wallace Stevens’ poetry, and the relation that it might have with the wider world, ... Read More...

Review: Arthur Drooker, American Ruins (New York and London: Merrell, 2007)

Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006)

Samuel Fisher Dodson, Berryman’s Henry

Stephanie Rains, The Irish-American in Popular Culture

Stephen Mennell, The American Civilizing Process

Lee Marshall, Bob Dylan: The Never Ending Star