American Literature in Transition, 1820–1860

The essays in American Literature in Transition, 1820-1860 offer a new approach to the antebellum era, one that frames the age not merely as the precursor to the Civil War but as indispensable for understanding present crises around such issues as race, imperialism, climate change, and the role of literature in American society. The essays make visible and usable the period's fecund imagined futures, futures that certainly included disunion but not only disunion. Tracing the historical contexts, literary forms and formats, global coordinates, and present reverberations of antebellum literature and culture, the essays in this volume build on existing scholarship while indicating exciting new avenues for research and teaching. Taken together, the essays in this volume make this era's literature relevant for a new generation of students and scholars.

• Provides cultural and political keyword essays that situate new scholarship in a longer historiography, allowing students and other readers to gain a grounding in previous scholarship
• Essays on literary forms and formats provide up-to-date research on traditional forms, such as popular poetry, allowing readers can see the relation between form, aesthetic judgments (such as 'what makes a poem good?'), and circulation (the way in which texts circulate in print and through performances and are collected and archived)
• Newly canonical authors join the traditional canon and expand what we know about American literary history and its literary genealogy, providing readers with fresh insights into canonical authors and a new list of antebellum authors to read who may be less often taught but no less important to the literary history