Rachel Greenwald Smith

Derrick R. Spires

Christine Bold

Hsuan L. Hsu

Christopher Looby

Joseph Rezek

Justine S. Murison

Laura L. Mielke

Christina Roberts

Rodrigo Lazo

Alisha Knight

Michael Everton

Covering American literature from its pre-contact Indigenous beginnings through the Reconstruction period, the first two volumes of The Broadview Anthology of American Literature represent a substantial reconceiving of the canon of early American literature. Guided by the latest scholarship in American literary studies, and deeply committed to inclusiveness, social responsibility, and rigorous contextualization, the anthology balances representation of widely agreed-upon major works with an emphasis on American literature’s diversity, variety, breadth, and connections with the rest of the Americas. Highlights of Volume A: Beginnings to 1820 • Complete texts of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative and Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette • In-depth Contexts sections on such topics as “Slavery and Resistance,” “Rebellions and Revolutions,” and “Print Culture and Popular Literature” • Broader and more extensive coverage of Indigenous oral and visual literature than in competing anthologies • Full author sections in the anthology devoted not only to frequently anthologized figures but also to authors such as Anne Hutchinson, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Briton Hammon

The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Volume A: Beginnings to 1820

In the early nineteenth century, London publishers dominated the transatlantic book trade. No one felt this more keenly than authors from Ireland, Scotland, and the United States who struggled to establish their own national literary traditions while publishing in the English metropolis. Authors such as Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, Walter Scott, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper devised a range of strategies to transcend the national rivalries of the literary field. By writing prefaces and footnotes addressed to a foreign audience, revising texts specifically for London markets, and celebrating national particularity, provincial authors appealed to English readers with idealistic stories of cross-cultural communion. From within the messy and uneven marketplace for books, Joseph Rezek argues, provincial authors sought to exalt and purify literary exchange. In so doing, they helped shape the Romantic-era belief that literature inhabits an autonomous sphere in society. London and the Making of Provincial Literature tells an ambitious story about the mutual entanglement of the history of books and the history of aesthetics in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Situated between local literary scenes and a distant cultural capital, enterprising provincial authors and publishers worked to maximize success in London and to burnish their reputations and build their industry at home. Examining the production of books and the circulation of material texts between London and the provincial centers of Dublin, Edinburgh, and Philadelphia, Rezek claims that the publishing vortex of London inspired a dynamic array of economic and aesthetic practices that shaped an era in literary history.

Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800-1850

London and the Making of Provincial Literature

Joseph Rezek

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