Bøger i Horizons in Theory and American Culture serien

In his ingeniously argued new study, Louis Renza extends the idea of privacy beyond the received wisdom of its popular legal and psychological conceptions and, iconoclastically, beyond its conception in postmodern literary theory to show that the public-private paradigm has import for American literary texts past and present.

Explores the relationship between contemporary critical theory and the new form of poetic expression, visible in the work of Charles Bernstein, Michael Palmer, and Susan Howe, called Language poetry. Linda Reinfeld holds that the experimental work of the Language poets should not be dismissed as esoteric or inaccessible.

Linda Bolton uses six extraordinarily resonant moments in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American history to highlight the ethical challenge that the treatment of Native and African persons presented to the new republic's ideal of freedom. Most daringly, she examines the efficacy of the Declaration of Independence as a revolutionary text.

Lucidly composed, theoretically sophisticated and up-to-the-minute, Going the Distance painstakingly recovers the dissident American subjective in modernist literary discourse within its fullest cultural context.

These eleven essays confront the ongoing problem of defining American and modern - terms that often travel together as they defy periodisation and other boundaries. Reading questions of nationalism and literature against the grain, contributors address the epistemology and history of literary canonization.