This volume presents a complex portrait of the United States of America grappling with the trials of national adolescence. Topics include (but are not limited to): the dynamics of language and power, the treachery of memory, the lived experience of racial and economic inequality, the aesthetics of Indigeneity, the radical possibilities of disability, the fluidity of gender and sexuality, the depth and culture-making power of literary genre, the history of poetics, the cult of performance, and the hidden costs of foodways. Taken together, the essays offer a vision of a vibrant, contradictory, and conflicted early US Republic resistant to consensus accountings and poised to inform new and better origin stories for the polity to come.

‘Howell and LaFleur’s collection should put to rest debates about whether our field suffers a theory deficit and neglects aesthetics and form. The volume’s essays adroitly handle topics as wide-ranging as using queer crip theory and decolonizing Native literary aesthetics; they also sharpen our attention to genre with a scope of themes including paranoid style and revival hymn poetics. The volume’s wealth of information, density of primary text references, and bibliographic coverage also equip anyone teaching early American literature courses with fresh pedagogical impulses and a wellspring of spin-off subjects to guide undergraduate and graduate research; as with good teaching, the essays assiduously note the greater amount of work remaining to be done on a variety of topics, texts, authors, and archives.’

Patrick Erben Source: Early American Literature