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  3. Cambridge Themes in American Literature and Culture

Twenty-first century America puzzles many citizens and observers. A frequently cited phrase to describe current partisan divisions is Lincoln's 'A house divided against itself cannot stand', a warning of the perils to the Union from divisions generated by slavery. America seems divided in almost every way, on almost every attitude. Civic dialogue on issues often seems extremely difficult. America is an experiment always in process, a remarkable union of 300 million diverse people covering all races and faiths. As a forum in which ideologies and interpretations abound, literary studies has a role to play in explanation and analysis. The series Cambridge Themes in American Literature and Culture will address the key cultural themes that have brought America to its current moment. Primarily reference books, they will offer a summation of critical knowledge on key cultural themes while also offering an intervention in the present moment. This series will offer a distinctive, authoritative treatment of the key literary and cultural strains in American life while also pointing in new critical directions.

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9 results in Cambridge Themes in American Literature and Culture

Money and American Literature
  • Edited by Paul Crosthwaite
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2025
    Print publication:
    30 September 2025
  • Few topics are as central to the American literary imagination as money. American writers' preoccupations with money predate the foundation of the United States and persist to the present day. Writers have been among the sharpest critics and most enchanted observers of an American social world dominated by the 'cash nexus'; and they have reckoned with imaginative writing's own deep and ambivalent entanglements with the logics of inscription, circulation, and valuation that define the money economy itself. As a dominant measure of value, money has also profoundly shaped representations of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. American literature's engagements with money – and with directly related topics including debt, credit, finance, and the capitalist market – are among Americanists' most prominent concerns. This landmark volume synthesizes and builds upon the abundance of research in the field to provide the first comprehensive mapping of money's crucial role over five centuries of American literary history.

Whiteness and American Literature
  • Edited by Jolene Hubbs
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • This volume provides an illuminating exploration of how ideas about whiteness have shaped the literature and culture of the United States. Covering nearly 250 years – from the 1790 Naturalization Act, which limited access to citizenship to immigrants who were 'free white person[s],' to the present – Whiteness and American Literature considers how a broad spectrum of novels, movies, short stories, television shows, poems, songs, and other works depict whiteness. The collection's twenty accessible and engaging chapters by renowned scholars analyze representations of whiteness in a variety of historical periods, literary genres, and aesthetic forms. Chapters also survey scholarly work at the crossroads of whiteness studies and disability studies, food studies, and other academic disciplines. Designed for scholars, students, and general readers, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the role whiteness plays in the US imagination.

Jazz and American Culture
  • Edited by Michael Borshuk
  • Published online:
    09 November 2023
    Print publication:
    30 November 2023
  • Almost immediately after jazz became popular nationally in the United States in the early 20th century, American writers responded to what this exciting art form signified for listeners. This book takes an expansive view of the relationship between this uniquely American music and other aspects of American life, including books, films, language, and politics. Observing how jazz has become a cultural institution, widely celebrated as 'America's classical music,' the book also never loses sight of its beginnings in Black expressive culture and its enduring ability to critique problems of democracy or speak back to violence and inequality, from Jim Crow to George Floyd. Taking the reader through time and across expressive forms, this volume traces jazz as an aesthetic influence, a political force, and a representational focus in American literature and culture. It shows how Jazz has long been a rich source of aesthetic stimulation, influencing writers as stylistically wide-ranging as Langston Hughes, Eudora Welty, and James Baldwin, or artists as diverse as Aaron Douglas, Jackson Pollock, and Gordon Parks.

Race in American Literature and Culture
  • Edited by John Ernest
  • Published online:
    26 May 2022
    Print publication:
    16 June 2022
  • Exploring the unsteady foundations of American literary history, Race in American Literature and Culture examines the hardening of racial fault lines throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth while considering aspects of the literary and interrelated traditions that emerged from this fractured cultural landscape. A multicultural study of the influential and complex presence of race in the American imagination, the book pushes debate in exciting new directions. Offering expert explorations of how the history of race has been represented and written about, it shows in what ways those representations and writings have influenced wider American culture. Distinguished scholars from African American, Latinx, Asian American, Native American, and white American studies foreground the conflicts in question across different traditions and different modes of interpretation, and are thus able comprehensively and creatively to address in the volume how and why race has been so central to American literature as a whole.

The City in American Literature and Culture
  • Edited by Kevin R. McNamara
  • Published online:
    06 August 2021
    Print publication:
    05 August 2021
  • The city's 'Americanness' has been disputed throughout US history. Pronounced dead in the late twentieth century, cities have enjoyed a renaissance in the twenty-first. Engaging the history of urban promise and struggle as represented in literature, film, and visual arts, and drawing on work in the social sciences, The City in American Literature and Culture examines the large and local forces that shape urban space and city life and the street-level activity that remakes culture and identities as it contests injustice and separation. The first two sections examine a range of city spaces and lives; the final section brings the city into conversation with Marxist geography, critical race studies, trauma theory, slow/systemic violence, security theory, posthumanism, and critical regionalism, with a coda on city literature and democracy.

Gender in American Literature and Culture
  • Edited by Jean M. Lutes, Jennifer Travis
  • Published online:
    01 April 2021
    Print publication:
    15 April 2021
  • Gender in American Literature and Culture introduces readers to key developments in gender studies and American literary criticism. It offers nuanced readings of literary conventions and genres from early American writings to the present and moves beyond inflexible categories of masculinity and femininity that have reinforced misleading assumptions about public and private spaces, domesticity, individualism, and community. The book also demonstrates how rigid inscriptions of gender have perpetuated a legacy of violence and exclusion in the United States. Responding to a sense of 21st century cultural and political crisis, it illuminates the literary histories and cultural imaginaries that have set the stage for urgent contemporary debates.

Climate and American Literature
  • Edited by Michael Boyden
  • Published online:
    18 February 2021
    Print publication:
    04 March 2021
  • Climate has infused the literary history of the United States, from the writings of explorers and conquerors, over early national celebrations of the American climate, to the flowering of romantic nature writing. This volume traces this complex semantic history in American thought and literature to examine rhetorical and philosophical discourses that continue to propel and constrain American climate perceptions today. It explores how American literature from its inception up until the present engages with the climate, both real and perceived. Climate and American Literature attends to the central place that the climate has historically occupied in virtually all aspects of American life, from public health and medicine, over the organization of the political system and the public sphere, to the culture of sensibility, aesthetics and literary culture. It details American inflections of climate perceptions over time to offer revealing new perspectives on one of the most pressing issues of our time.

War and American Literature
  • Edited by Jennifer Haytock
  • Published online:
    20 January 2021
    Print publication:
    04 February 2021
  • This book examines representations of war throughout American literary history, providing a firm grounding in established criticism and opening up new lines of inquiry. Readers will find accessible yet sophisticated essays that lay out key questions and scholarship in the field. War and American Literature provides a comprehensive synthesis of the literature and scholarship of US war writing, illuminates how themes, texts, and authors resonate across time and wars, and provides multiple contexts in which texts and a war's literature can be framed. By focusing on American war writing, from the wars with the Native Americans and the Revolutionary War to the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this volume illuminates the unique role representations of war have in the US imagination.

Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture
  • Edited by John Hay
  • Published online:
    03 December 2020
    Print publication:
    17 December 2020
  • The idea of America has always encouraged apocalyptic visions. The 'American Dream' has not only imagined the prospect of material prosperity; it has also imagined the end of the world. 'Final forecasts' constitute one of America's oldest literary genres, extending from the eschatological theology of the New England Puritans to the revolutionary discourse of the early republic, the emancipatory rhetoric of the Civil War, the anxious fantasies of the atomic age, and the doomsday digital media of today. For those studying the history of America, renditions of the apocalypse are simply unavoidable. This book brings together two dozen essays by prominent scholars that explore the meanings of apocalypse across different periods, regions, genres, registers, modes, and traditions of American literature and culture. It locates the logic and rhetoric of apocalypse at the very core of American literary history.