Russ Castronovo

Biographic Data

ID355394
NAMERuss Castronovo
GIVEN NAMESRuss
FAMILY NAMECastronovo
SIGNATURECASTRONOVO R
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison
ORCID0000-0003-3254-4726
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS46
TOTAL CITATIONS101
AUTHOR COUNT41
EDITOR COUNT5
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1992
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX3

  • The New Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies

    Open AccessSari Altschuler, Colleen Glenney Boggs et al.BOOKNew Nineteenth-Century American…2025

    The New Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies takes stock of critical developments over the past twenty years, offering a fresh examination of key interpretative issues in this field. In eclectic fashion, it presents a wide range of new approaches in such areas as print and material culture, Black studies, Latinx studies, disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, postsecular studies, and Indigenous studies. This volume also maps ou…

  • Frozen Subjectivity: Vulnerability and Aesthetics at the End of the World

    Russ CastronovoARTICLEboundary 22025References: 14

    Using an eclectic mix of sources including political theory, a novel by Don DeLillo, a translation of Heidegger, and a visit to cryopreservation facility, this article examines how the will to sovereignty is shadowed by its disavowed other, vulnerability. Wounding constitutes the etymological heart of vulnerability (vulnus signifies wound), and this apprehension of injury generates the impossible fantasy of a subjectivity impermeable to change. S…

  • Response to Mark Maguire and Setha Low’s Review of American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability

    Open AccessRuss CastronovoARTICLEPerspectives on Politics2024

  • American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability

    Russ CastronovoBOOKAmerican Insecurity and the…2023

    An incisive critique that examines the origins of contemporary American ideas about surveillance, terrorism, and white supremacy For more than three centuries, Americans have pursued strategies of security that routinely make them feel vulnerable, unsafe, and insecure. American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability probes this paradox by examining American attachments to the terror of the sublime, the fear of uncertainty, and the anxieties …

  • The Oxford Handbook of Twentieth-Century American Literature

    Leslie Bow, Russ CastronovoBOOKOxford Handbook of Twentieth-Centur…2022

    The Oxford Handbook of Twentieth-Century American Literature is designed around an impossibility: that of representing the diversity of the texts and methodologies that comprise—as well as trouble—the field. Rather than attempt a compilation of one hundred years’ worth of novels, poetry, autobiography, and other forms of narration and writing that would provide an illusory notion of coverage or representation, this volume seeks to foreground the …

  • Oxford Handbook of Twentieth-Century American Literature

    Leslie Bow, Oxford Editor et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of Twentieth-Centur…2022

  • Jeffersonian Trembling: White Nationalism and the Racial Origins of National Security

    Open AccessRuss CastronovoARTICLEJournal of American Studies2022

    This essay examines how the project of national security was beset by the affective intensities of “Jeffersonian trembling.” While white nationalists today see themselves as threatened with dispossession and the loss of historical entitlement, mainstream supporters of the movement to colonize US blacks leveraged their fear to export insecurity and precarity onto African Americans. The claim of “white genocide” dates back to biopolitical anxieties…

  • Beyond 1776: Globalizing the Cultures of the American Revolution

    Open AccessRuss CastronovoARTICLEJournal of American History2020

    Historical lore surrounding figures such as Andrzej Kościuszko, Baron von Steuben, and the Marquis de Lafayette has long lent an international tincture to the American Revolution. But individual biography often fails to capture the global networks that made this colonial rebellion an event with effects that have extended across oceans and hemispheres. In ten chapters plus an introduction, Beyond 1776 describes how the influence of the Revolution …

  • Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of SpeciesThe Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages. By Mimi Thi NguyenNeocitizenship: Political Culture after Democ…

    Russ CastronovoARTICLEAmerican Literature2019

    From the rise of the novel to the outpouring of lyric self-expression, claims about literature’s promotion of a distinctly modern identity known as “the individual” have settled into truths. The three books under review here turn to biopolitics in an effort to describe how aesthetic and other texts help define and shape entities far larger than the individual: citizenry, mass, public, population. The archives they invoke are not recognizably lite…

  • Ayn Rand’s Vibrator: Masochism as Conservative Style

    Russ CastronovoARTICLEboundary 22019Cited by: 1References: 14

    By treating conservatism as a style of thought, this essay examines how a flair for abjuring the social contract, social welfare, socialism, indeed, society itself provides pleasure from the pain of violation and lost autonomy. The innovation of Ayn Rand’s writing is to make this victimization sexy. For the Randian conservative who feels abused by the social welfare schemes of the liberal state, masochism restores autonomy by making the individua…

  • Information Warfare and Slow Media: Loyalism and the Lesson of Revolutionary Failure

    Russ CastronovoARTICLEAmerican Literature2017References: 7

    The wager of this essay is that consideration of an antiquarian media environment—the American colonies in the era of Revolutionary ferment—can help identify tactics for slowing the communications juggernaut that threatens to overwhelm public political discussion. In contrast to accounts that emphasize the speed of propaganda, political operatives in America loyal to the Crown deliberately sought to slow the flow of information, including the str…

  • James Fenimore Cooper and the NSA: Security, Property, Liberalism

    Russ CastronovoARTICLEAmerican Literary History2016

    Journal Article James Fenimore Cooper and the NSA: Security, Property, Liberalism Get access Russ Castronovo Russ Castronovo Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar American Literary History, Volume 28, Issue 4, Winter 2016, Pages 677–701, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajw044 Published: 01 November 2016

  • The Oxford Handbook Of Propaganda Studies

    Jonathan Auerbach, Russ CastronovoBOOKThe Oxford Handbook Of Propaganda…2014

    This handbook includes 23 essays by leading scholars from a variety of disciplines, divided into three sections: (1) Histories and Nationalities, (2) Institutions and Practices, and (3) Theories and Methodologies. In addition to dealing with the thorny question of definition, the handbook takes up an expansive set of assumptions and a full range of approaches that move propaganda beyond political campaigns and warfare to examine a wide array of c…

  • Introduction: After Critique

    Russ Castronovo, David GlimpARTICLEEnglish Language Notes2013

  • State Secrets: Ben Franklin and WikiLeaks

    Russ CastronovoARTICLECritical Inquiry2013Cited by: 3References: 8

  • The Oxford handbook of nineteenth-century American literature

    Russ CastronovoBOOKThe Oxford handbook of…2012

    How do we approach the rich field of nineteenth-century American literature? How might we recalibrate the coordinates of critical vision and open up new areas of investigation? To answer such questions, this volume brings together 23 original essays written by leading scholars in American literary studies. By examining specific novels, poems, essays, diaries and other literary examples, the authors confront head-on the implications, scope, and sc…

  • Teaching the Good

    Russ CastronovoARTICLEJournal of Narrative Theory2011References: 2

  • Epistolary Propaganda: Forgery and Revolution in the Atlantic World

    Russ CastronovoARTICLEboundary 22011Cited by: 3

    How was public opinion forged in the Atlantic world during the age of the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions? This essay takes up this question by looking at the vexed role of propaganda in manufacturing democratic consent. In particular, it examines a counterfeit set of letters attributed to George Washington. The strange career of these forged communiqués reveals how epistolary propaganda widened public opinion so that it intersected wit…

  • Trains, Planes, and What Was African American Literature

    Russ CastronovoARTICLEAfrican American Review2011

    Trains, Planes, and What Was African American Literature? Russ Castronovo (bio) How does What Was African American Literature? by Kenneth W. Warren travel? In asking this question, I want to consider how Warren’s book travels to two incommensurate but not exclusive sites—the public sphere and ethnic American studies. The mobility of any book is a material matter: books can be tomes, too heavy or rare to lug around, but they can also be convenient…

  • Books

    Ghada M Al-Akhdar, Deborah Jenson et al.ARTICLEInterventions2011References: 2

  • States of Emergency: The Object of American Studies

    Russ Castronovo, Susan Gillman et al.BOOKStates of emergency2009

    This book explores the purpose and politics of the field. The contributors to this volume argue that for too long, inclusiveness has substituted for methodology in American studies scholarship. The ten original essays collected here call for a robust comparativism that is attuned theoretically to questions of both space and time. States of Emergency asks readers to engage in a thought experiment: imagine that you have an object you want to study …

  • "On Imperialism, see…": Ghosts of the Present in Cultures of United States Imperialism

    Russ CastronovoARTICLEAmerican Literary History2008

    Journal Article “On Imperialism, see...”: Ghosts of the Present in Cultures of United States Imperialism Get access Russ Castronovo Russ Castronovo [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar American Literary History, Volume 20, Issue 3, Fall 2008, Pages 427–438, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajn025 Published: 13 May 2008

  • Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era

    Russ CastronovoBOOKBeautiful Democracy2007

  • The Noises of American Literature, 1890-1985: Toward a History of Literary Acoustics; Looking into Walt Whitman: American Art, 1850-1920

    Russ CastronovoARTICLEAmerican Literature2007

    Book Review| June 01 2007 The Noises of American Literature, 1890-1985: Toward a History of Literary Acoustics; Looking into Walt Whitman: American Art, 1850-1920 Russ Castronovo Russ Castronovo Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2007) 79 (2): 422–424. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-79-2-422 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Russ Castron…

  • Beauty along the Color Line: Lynching, Aesthetics, and the Crisis

    Open AccessRuss CastronovoARTICLEPMLA/Publications of the Modern…2006

    “What have we who are slaves and blacks to do with Art?” asked DuBois in his 1926 essay “Criteria of Negro Art.” In an era of lynching, art hardly seemed appropriate for political struggle. Nevertheless, DuBois and his colleagues at the Crisis risked making connections between lynching and art by putting aesthetics to democratic use even as the theatricality of ritualized violence gave lynching an aesthetic dimension. Starting with DuBois's manif…