American Literature
Journal Data
| Type | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Duke University Press (US) |
| ISSN | 0002-9831 / 1527-2117 |
| Scopus | 28156 |
| OpenAlex | S183016999 |
| MAG | 183016999 |
| Website | http://americanliterature.dukejournals.org/ |
| Total publications | 8.658 |
| Coverage period | 1929 - 2025 |
| Country | US |
| Language | EN |
| Indexing | Scopus indexed |
| Cited by | 1.267 |
| Impact factor | 0.112 |
| SJR | 0.258 (Q1) |
| SNIP | 1.305 |
| CiteScore | 1.3 |
| h-index | 11 |
| i10-index | 12 |
| Female authorship share | 58.3% |
American Literature is dedicated to American literary studies, primarily a humanities discipline focused on textual analysis. While literature can be an object of cultural analysis, this journal's core focus is not on social or cultural processes in an anthropological way
Literature and Literary Theory · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology · American and British Literature Analysis · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · American Literature and Culture · American Literature and Humor Studies · American Sports and Literature · Archaeology and Natural History
Cultivating Breath, Creating Shelter with Plants: Replanting Plantation Afterlives
Drawing on Black studies scholarship that interrogates plantation afterlives, this article examines how contemporary Black authors and artists harness the symbolic and authorial power of plants to develop what the author terms cultivation of breath: a praxis of gardening that bears witness to and yet resists the material legacies of racial colonialism. The first section, on Jamaica Kincaid’s My Garden (Book): (2001), illustrates how colonial imag…
Loomings: Joan Naviyuk Kane, Lyric Refractions, and the Poetry of Arctic Melt
This article examines the affordances of Indigenous experimental lyric in a melting Arctic. In conversation with geographer Jen Rose Smith’s turn to foreground “experiential and imaginary geographies of Arctic space,” the author explores how the poetry of the North American Arctic represents experiences ranging from colonial extraction to climate disruption. The analysis centers on Joan Naviyuk Kane’s 2019 “Citation in the Wake of Melville” and c…
Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of FeelingThe Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics
“That the senses and the symbolic are coextensive is a truth so obvious as to be invisible; sensation is inscribed into the etymological meaning of aesthetics (aisthetikos in Greek) as “of or relating to sensation,” as Erica Fretwell and Hsuan Hsu reminded us in their September 2023 American Literature special issue, “Senses With/out Subjects” (447-8). That the senses have only come into such relief for us now cannot be disentangled from the larg…
Carmen Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft and the Hemispheric Legacies of White Women Writers of the Nineteenth-Century South
In Carmen Boullosa’s novel Texas: The Great Theft (2013), nineteenth-century US literary culture makes a notable entrance through characters based on US authors or works, including a quartet of US Southern white women writers. Boullosa uses these characters, based on identifiable authors, to centrally situate US Southern women writers in the hemispheric, discursive spread of empire occurring in nineteenth-century borderland conflicts. As a Mexica…
Where I Have Never Been: Migration, Melancholia, and Memory in Asian American Narratives of ReturnDiasporic Poetics: Asian Writing in the United States, Canada, and Australia
Algorithm Is Gonna Get You: Ad Tech and the Homeland Security State
This article considers how ad tech companies in the early twenty-first century developed an infrastructure and algorithmic experience that quantifies users as consumer subjects. From the start, these quantifications have been supported by the American security sector, but after 9/11 the Homeland Security state has increasingly appropriated these tools and their constructed subjectivities. The author looks at Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love …
How White Men Won the Culture Wars: A History of Veteran AmericaAnxious Men: Masculinity in American Fiction of the Mid-Twentieth Century
Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational FormBorderwaters: Amid the Archipelagic States of America
Spinster Regionalism: Asexuality, Genre, and Type in the Shadow of Consumer Desire
At the fin de siècle, a period in American letters remembered for the rise of naturalism, romance, and a new orientation to readerly pleasure, regionalism moved in the opposite direction, becoming obsessed with the austere and sexless spinster. This article revisits this spinster regionalist corpus to recover the asexual cultural politics of both the spinster and this corpus’s spinster aesthetic. The corpus’s spinster disavows appetites, a figure…
The Ghost and the Gimmick: Spirit Photography and the Commodification of Secularism
This article considers how spirit photography operates in the context of secularism. It begins by tracking controversies around two nineteenth-century spirit photographers, William J. Mumler and Edouard Buguet, examining photographs and written texts made with the purpose of mocking and debunking Spiritualism. Intended to amuse, these works pointed the finger at the real frauds and their dupes; they sold their audiences both the pleasures of illu…
The Body Cannot Forget”: Alternative Kinships, Speculative Travelers, and Disability in the Weird Western
This article pursues a disability studies reading of the western, examining how one contemporary western, Tom Lin’s Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu (2021), threads together speculative fiction, disability, and alternative kinship to transform the tropes of the genre. Thousand Crimes presents a frontier that both recreates and expands the largely mythic world of the western, centering characters typically excluded or cast as villains. The eponymous Mi…
Dear AI Reader: Nonhuman Perspective and Evolutionary Thinking in the Human-Machine Relation
Many writers figure machines in evolutionary terms, as living and evolving organisms. The American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick observed in his 1972 speech “The Android and the Human” that in the last decade “our environment, and I mean our man-made world of machines, artificial constructs, computers, electronic systems, interlinking homeostatic components—all this is in fact beginning more and more to possess . . . animation.” Already i…
Diversity Aesthetics: Figuring the Fate of DEI in Contemporary Black Office Fiction
For scholars and activists on the left, institutional diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) systems are often sites of ambivalence and disillusionment, yet recent right-wing campaigns to eliminate these programs necessitate new ways of evaluating their cultural significance. Has DEI changed American culture, and if so, how? The 2020s have already witnessed a wave of fictional narratives by Black writers addressing this question. This article foc…
Literary Forensics as Method: Chemical Analysis, Food Stains, and Readerly Encounters with Nineteenth-Century Cookbooks
Much of the study of cookbooks relies on guesswork and reading between the lines that are written down—the type of guesswork that requires cookbooks be read alongside other types of texts rather than standing on their own. This article presents a novel method for analyzing and reading food stains in historical manuscripts using infrared spectroscopy, a technique commonly used in analytical chemistry and forensic science, in combination with liter…
Shattered Remains: Richard Wright and Hannah Arendt on Totalitarianism and the Destiny of the Common
Demonstrating that Richard Wright anticipates the theory of totalitarianism famously outlined by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), this article argues that, for both thinkers, fascism offers a compensatory “binding” mechanism by which the lonely, worldless moderns can locate the principle that since Aristotle has been called “the common good” (to koinon agathon). In his later work, including Black Power: A Record of Reaction…
Madre de Sangre / Mother of Blood: Vampirizing La Virgen in Feminist Short Fiction by Terri de la Peña and Kleya Forté-Escamilla
Through short fiction by contemporary Chicana writers Terri de la Peña and Kleya Forté-Escamilla, this article explores how Latina feminist representations and religious pressures converge in the figure of the Virgin Mary. Acknowledging the implicit call for a more diverse, inclusive vision of La Virgen, the discussion analyzes how each author incorporates the Marian imagery of blood and roses into a vampire-themed meditation on motherotic desire…
Because It Never Dies”: Archipelagic Time in from unincorporated territory [ lukao ]
Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory [lukao], the fourth volume in his poetry series titled from unincorporated territory, tells overlapping narratives of Guåhan’s (Guam’s) colonial and environmental histories, mixed with his speaker’s memories and family history. However, as he brings these interrelated narratives together, he pulls each narrative out of linear time and plugs it into what this article calls archipelagic time: a mix…
Speculation and Scientific Method: Thomas Harriot’s Virginia IPO
This article proposes that Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and True Report of 1588 is the first initial public offering (IPO) in history and that understanding it as such provides new insight into how plantation capitalism and scientific method were conceptualized in a mutually constitutive Anglo-American discourse. First, the author traces how the practical exigencies posed by the anomalous form of English New World colonization that Walter Ralegh pursu…
Introduction: New Directions in the Study of New World Knowledge Making
house's account of the 1622 Powhatan Uprising, the attack on the Virginia colony by members of the Powhatan paramount chiefdom that claimed the lives of 347 English settlers and forcefully repudiated their encroachments into the southern Algonquian homelands of Tsenacommacah.Noting that the Powhatans had "carried away" several of the colonists' "Peeces [guns] with munition (the use whereof they know not)," Waterhouse (1622: 21) reports that their…
Witnessing Otherwise in John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition
In 1796, John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam was published in London, claiming new insights into the natural world of the colony. Although Stedman generated some reports of Suriname, many of his natural world descriptions were added once he returned to England. As such, this article shows how by engaging in citational practices inherent to the natural history genre, especially when…
Making Americans in the New York Public Library: Fantasy and Realities
For marginalized readers in the United States, the public library has often been an icon of integration, assimilation, and self-making. At the New York Public Library (NYPL) of the 1920s, children’s librarians, mostly white and native born, assiduously drilled immigrant and African American children in acceptable modes of behavior and belief. To that end, they framed library protocols as indispensable American norms and carefully selected highlig…
Counterfeit Detectors: The Literary Origins of the US Secret Service
This article examines the US Secret Service, a federal agency created during the Civil War to protect the greenback against counterfeiters, and its literary origins. It explores an overlooked chapter in the history of American crime and detective fiction, one that has special relevance today with the rise of cryptocurrencies. The author argues that Secret Service agents who turned authors, as well as professional writers enlisted to support the a…
The Black Atlantic Monthly: Nicholas Said and the Limits of Literary Citizenship
This article argues that Nicholas Said’s “A Native of Bornoo” exposes the limits of literary and political inclusion in the Atlantic Monthly, where it was published in 1867, and in the larger cultural milieu the magazine represents. Said arrived in the United States in 1860 as a freed person after a period of enslavement in Africa, Asia, and Europe, and with “A Native of Bornoo” he reached the seeming pinnacle of white literary culture. Although …
Revolutionary Worldmaking: James Monroe Whitfield’s Poems in Martin Delany’s Blake; or, The Huts of America
Martin Delany’s Blake, serialized in the Weekly Anglo-African in 1861–62, includes five unattributed poems from James Monroe Whitfield’s volume America and Other Poems, which appear in the novel as compositions of the Cuban revolutionary poet Placido. Largely overlooked in scholarship on Blake, Whitfield/Placido’s poems are crucial to the impending revolt of the oppressed because they foster a collective emancipatory consciousness and model, thro…
All Hail Cthulhu! On Lovecraft, Monstress , and Asian American Bildung
This study identifies Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s epic fantasy Monstress as a flashpoint for contemporary Asian American subject formation and the literary history of the bildungsroman. Though it follows the templates of both European and Asian American bildung, the graphic novel rejects the genre’s foundational tenets of assimilation and stability in favor of social justice and revolution. By analyzing Monstress through bildungsroman ideology…
The American Jeremiad
This essay challenges the prevailing notion of the jeremiad as a cyclical rhetoric of despair and hope, arguing that it is instead a linear form rooted in the unique historical experience of Puritan America. Van Cromphout and Bercovitch trace the evolution of the jeremiad from its biblical origins through its adaptation by Puritan preachers and its subsequent secularization in American political and social discourse. They demonstrate how the jere…
Manifest Domesticity
Introduction: After the Postsecular
the notion that something called "secularization" provides an adequate conceptual framework for the post-Enlightenment movement of bodies and belief, of thought and authority, has come under sustained and multidimensional assault.We have become, as the term goes, postsecular, to the degree we understand those assaults to have been, finally, cumulatively, fatal.It's a fairly noncontroversial position at this point, as stated by Asad way back in 20…
Poor Eliza
Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience
With a series of brilliant and provocative essays, Susan Willis has produced the first sustained, book-length study of fiction by contemporary American black women writers. Using a Marxist approach, Willis places the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Paule Marshall, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Toni Cade Bambara in a critical context that includes history, culture, politics, and literary theory. Willis work promises to make a major impact among sch…
The American Novel and its Tradition
Since earliest days, writes Richard Chase in this classic study, the American novel, in its most original and characteristic form, has worked out its destiny and defined itself by incorporating an element of romance. In his detailed study of works by Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, Frank Norris, George Washington Cable, William Dean Howells, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Wil…
Critical AI: A Field in Formation
Colonial Domesticity: White Women and United States Rule in the Philippines
Spinster Ecology: Rachel Carson, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Nonreproductive Futurity
In this essay, Ensor suggests that the figure of the spinster can help resolve the problems of futurity that confront queer ecocriticism insofar as the spinster practices an avuncular form of stewardship, tending the future without contributing directly to it. By looking at a series of texts that take up this mode of invested indirection in their content and form alike, she argues for a spinster ecology that alters our notion not only of where th…
The Irish Voice in America: 250 Years of Irish-American Fiction
Book Review| June 01 2001 The Irish Voice in America: 250 Years of Irish-American Fiction 2d ed. By Charles Fanning. Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky. 1999. x, 448 pp. Paper, $24.95. Enda Duffy Enda Duffy Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2001) 73 (2): 433–434. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-73-2-433 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation E…
Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs' Fiction
Toward a Postdigital Humanities: Cultural Analytics and the Computational Turn to Data-Driven Scholarship
What forms will literary and cultural criticism take in the twenty-first century, given the move toward open access, open data, and open government that is currently being promoted in the name of greater efficiency and transparency? Will the growing use of digital tools and data-led methodologies adopted from computer science to help us analyze the vast, networked nature of knowledge and information in postindustrial society produce a major chang…
Transforming Geographies of Black Time: How the Free Southern Theater Used the Plantation for Civil Rights Activism
This essay examines the cultural and political work of the Free Southern Theater, specifically how this company used plantations, porches, and cotton fields in order to build a radical black southern theater in the civil rights movement. Staging plays like Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot for black southern audiences, the theater challenged a violent structure of time at the heart of global modernity that I call black patience. By this I mean a…
Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, Junkie and other underground classics, is an odd yet central literary figure. He has been in every sense an outlaw. He spent time in jail, he shot and killed his wife and he was a drug addict forced to spend much of his life in exile from the United States, often on the run. He flaunted his homosexuality at a time when it was a criminal offence. From his upbringing in a middle-class St Louis suburb, hi…
The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Anita Hill
Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Anita Hill, American Literature, Vol. 65, No. 3, Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill (Sep., 1993), pp. 549-574
Thinking Across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism
In Thinking Across the American Grain Giles Gunn makes a major contribution to the current revival of pragmatism in America by showing how it provides the most critically resilient and constructive response to the intellectual challenges of postmodernism. Gunn reclaims and refurbishes elements of the pragmatic tradition that either have been lost or have undergone important changes and shows how newer critical approaches have strong roots in the …
Speculative Fictions of Slavery
Since the 1970s, African American novelists have persistently drawn on antirealist genres (including science fiction, fantasy, ghost stories, and magic realism) to revisit the history of slavery. Focusing on literary and mass-market fiction by authors such as Stephen Barnes, David Bradley, Octavia Butler, James McBride, and Phyllis Alesia Perry, Dubey explores the various ways the generic choice of speculative fiction sponsors a purposefully anti…
"A "Hive of Subtlety: Aesthetics and the End(s) of Cultural Studies
Aesthetics and the End(s) of Cultural StudiesAt alking head on the evening news in spring 2004, describing the Democratic primaries underway at the time, claimed that there was so little disagreement between candidates running for president that, at best, their differences were ''aesthetic.''What the commentator meant by aesthetic is unclear; probably, he simply meant superficial.In the current cultural moment in the United States, aesthetics hav…
Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism
Lionel Trilling was one of the twentieth century’s most widely read and influential American literary critics. Mark Krupnick traces Trilling’s career from the 1920s through the 1970s, following the shifting intellectual and ideological currents in his thought. Krupnick places Trilling’s criticism and fiction in the context of his New York intellectual group, illuminating the connection between Trilling’s preoccupation with self-definition and his…
Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860
"Free Soil and the Abolitionist Forests of Frederick Douglass's "The Heroic Slave
In the 1850s, Frederick Douglass set out to nurture emergent antislavery commitments within the most advanced political milieu of the antebellum decade, the Free Soil movement. Douglass developed a protoenvironmentalist critique of capitalism's alienation of workers from the land, arguing that liberty achieved its truest expression when free people mixed their labor with nature in the pursuit of self-reliance. Democratic access to arable land was…
The (Extended) South of Black Folk: Intraregional and Transnational Migrant Labor in Jonah's Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching God
Research Article| December 01 2007 The (Extended) South of Black Folk: Intraregional and Transnational Migrant Labor in Jonah's Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching God Martyn Bone Martyn Bone Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2007) 79 (4): 753-779. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2007-038 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Martyn Bone; The (Extended) South of…
Reclaiming Sentimental Literature
Derek Walcott's Poetry: American Mimicry
With the 1989 publication of his epic poem, Omeros, Derek Walcott stands as a major poet of the twentieth century. However, while most critics agree that Walcott's writing warrants considerable attention, they fault it for being too derivative. Rei Terada deals explicitly with facets of Walcott's work that are often misunderstood by critics and other readers. Terada is particularly interested in Walcott's provocative hypothesis that there is a co…
Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692
1. Dark Eve 2. The girls of Salem 3. Boys and girls together 4. June 10, 1692 5. July 19, 1692 6. August 19, 1692 7. George Burroughs and the Mathers 8. September 22, 1692 9. Assessing an inextricable storm 10. Salem story
American Negro Folk-Songs
The Dictionary of American Biography
Biblical Allusions in Poe
The Reinterpretation of American Literature
Cotton Mather: Keeper of the Puritan Conscience
Sidney Lanier and Paul Hamilton Hayne: Three Unpublished Letters
SIDNEY LANIER must have felt flattered to receive, I867, a letter from Paul Hamilton Hayne appreciation of a brief lyric by him which had appeared one of the current periodicals. At the time Lanier was serving as principal of an academy at Prattville, Alabama, because, the unrest which followed the Civil War, he had not been able to find another occupation more to his liking. Except for a few poems which he had contributed to Round Table,' a New …
Annals of the New York Stage
Selected Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
Wordsworth in Early American Criticism
"Five Sources of Edgar Allan Poe's "Pinakidia
Henry Timrod: Laureate of the Confederacy
Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
Whitman and Dowden
Fenimore Cooper: Critic of His Times: New Letters from Rome and Paris, 1830-31
The Heart of Hawthorne's Journals
The Cable Family in Indiana
Letters from Brook Farm, 1844-1847
Parson Weems of the Cherry-Tree
Early Criticism of Emily Dickinson
Our Revolutionary Forefathers: The Letters of Francois, Marquis de Barbe-Marbois, 1779-1785
Ambrose Bierce and The Civil War
Sarah Orne Jewett
The French Literature of Louisiana
American Literature: An Interpretative Survey
A Brook Farm Labor Record