American Literature in Transition, 1770–1828

Frames a generically and culturally diverse literary portrait of the early USA, unsettling narratives of incipient national unity.

This volume presents a complex portrait of a US grappling with the trials of national adolescence. Subjects include: power, memory, racial and economic inequality, Indigeneity, disability, gender and sexuality, literary genre, poetics, performance, and foodways.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.