Christine Gerhardt Libri

Exploring the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman reveals their dual focus on nature as both a metaphorical realm and a tangible environment impacted by human actions. Their work reflects a significant cultural shift in 19th-century America, where wilderness transitioned from a resource to a cherished entity needing preservation. Christine Gerhardt examines how their poetry engages with emerging environmental sensibilities, highlighting their thematic and formal connections despite their differing styles. This analysis uncovers a rich dialogue about the complexities of human-nature relationships in their works.

This handbook offers students and researchers a compact introduction to the nineteenth-century American novel in the light of current debates, theoretical concepts, and critical methodologies. The volume turns to the nineteenth century as a formative era in American literary history, a time that saw both the rise of the novel as a genre, and the emergence of an independent, confident American culture. A broad range of concise essays by European and American scholars demonstrates how some of America‘s most well-known and influential novels responded to and participated in the radical transformations that characterized American culture between the early republic and the age of imperial expansion. Part I consists of 7 systematic essays on key historical and critical frameworks ― including debates aboutrace and citizenship, transnationalism, environmentalism and print culture, as well as sentimentalism, romance and the gothic, realism and naturalism. Part II provides 22 essays on individual novels, each combining an introduction to relevant cultural contexts with a fresh close reading and the discussion of critical perspectives shaped by literary and cultural theory.

Die Studie untersucht die Darstellung der Reconstruction-Periode im amerikanischen Roman und analysiert die kulturelle Arbeit dieser Texte in sich wandelnden historischen Kontexten. Zwischen 1870 und 1966 haben Reconstruction-Romane alternative Versionen von Geschichte formuliert und die Jahre nach dem Bürgerkrieg als Brennpunkt der Debatten um Rasse, Klasse und Geschlecht in das kulturelle Gedächtnis der Vereinigten Staaten eingeschrieben. Dabei strukturiert eine genrespezifische Reconstruction-Formel die Südstaaten als kulturelle Region radikal neu. Indem Reconstruction-Romane die Dynamik zwischen historischem Aufbruch und enttäuschten Visionen thematisieren, nehmen sie zugleich am Projekt der nationalen Selbstdefinition zwischen triumphalem Erfolg und drohendem Scheitern teil und werden als Gegenentwurf zum Geschichtsoptimismus des amerikanischen Westerns lesbar.