Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies

Review

"Innovative and thought-provoking, this collection will be of broad interest, opening up discussions on an array of texts, critical approaches, and developing conversations in the study of of nineteenth-century literature. With essays that are accessible, lucid, and utterly fascinating,Unsettled Statesoffers arresting analyses andmakes a real contributionto the field." -- Dana Nelson,author of Bad for Democracy

"Unsettled Statessheds light on the papers long swept under the rug ranging from early Hispanic literature to polar periodicals. More importantly, the authors of the articles conscientiously build up their discussions in relation to contemporary literature and critical theory, which makes the collection even more distinguishing and valuable for the twenty-first century reader." ― American Studies Journal

Product Description

In Unsettled States, Dana Luciano and
Ivy G. Wilson present some of
the most exciting emergent scholarship in American literary and cultural
studies of the “long” nineteenth century. Featuring eleven essays from senior
scholars across the discipline, the book responds to recent critical challenges
to the boundaries, both spatial and temporal, that have traditionally organized
scholarship within the field. The volume considers these recent challenges to
be aftershocks of earlier revolutions in content and method, and it seeks ways
of inhabiting and amplifying the ongoing unsettledness of the field.

Written
by scholars primarily working in the “minor” fields of critical race and ethnic
studies, feminist and gender studies, labor studies, and queer/sexuality
studies, the essays share a minoritarian critical orientation. Minoritarian
criticism, as an aesthetic, political, and ethical project, is dedicated to finding
new connections and possibilities within extant frameworks. Unsettled States seeks to demonstrate
how the goals of minoritarian critique may be actualized without automatic
recourse to a predetermined “minor” location, subject, or critical approach.
Its contributors work to develop practices of reading an “American
literature” in motion, identifying nodes of inquiry attuned to the rhythms of a
field that is always on the move.

About the Author

Dana Luciano is Associate Professor of English and Women's & Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (2007), which won the 2008 MLA Prize for a First Book. She co-edited, with Ivy G. Wilson, Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (2014), and “Queer Inhumanisms,” a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, with Mel Y. Chen (2015).

Ivy G. Wilson is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Program in American Studies at Northwestern University. His most recent book is Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Politics in the Antebellum U.S.