Programs and Areas

American Literature to 1900 Area

Harriet Beecher Stowe
(Photo: U.S. National Archive)

While our teaching and research range from the era of "New World" exploration and colonization to the first World War, our core research strength is the materialism of literary culture, with particular critical force in the long nineteenth century from 1790-1910. Under this more general rubric, our specializations include literary history; book history; periodical studies (our leadership in this field is well emblematized by the journal American Periodicals, edited by Steve Fink, Jared Gardner, and Susan Williams); and various individual projects such as Sara Crosby's on authorship and popular print culture, particularly crime writing; Steve Fink's on editors and magazines; Jared Gardner's on the media of literature from the 18th to the 20th centuries; Elizabeth Hewitt's on letters, as well as literature's relation to economics; Koritha Mitchell's on drama and lynching; Elizabeth Renker's on the production of American literature as a scholarly discipline, on the history of education, and the cultural history of poetry; Andrea Williams's on the class contours of African-American writing; and Susan Williams's on authorship and women writers. We also produce strong scholarship in theoretical fields, such as Rob Hughes' comparative work on Romantic ethics, aesthetics, and subjectivity, which brings American Romanticism into contact with its roots in the continental tradition, roots later obscured by the more national interests of twentieth-century Americanist scholarship.

Our versatile faculty offers a wide array of classes in literary history and culture, as well as on specialized genre, theory, and interdisciplinary topics, drawing fruitful connections to areas such as art history, popular culture, film, American studies,and the history of education, economics, theater, women's studies, aesthetics, philosophy, and music. From quarter to quarter you might find that our offerings include core classes in literary history as well as a changing array of special topics courses on such subjects as critical race theory; the media of literature; feminist theory; periodical studies; the relation between aesthetics and psychology; economics and literature; and music and poetry. Three of us have won major teaching awards.

The range of American dissertations our doctoral students have produced in recent years suggests our active connections with diverse trends in the field. From studies of authorship in the Early American Republic, to the Middle East in antebellum America, to American poetic culture between 1865 and 1904, to Norwegian-American literature from 1870 to1940, to child readers and American literature from 1700 to 1852, we create and cultivate a rich intellectual culture for students from the freshman year to the Ph.D.

English Faculty

Sara Crosby, (Marion Campus)
Frank Donoghue, (Columbus campus; major fields, academic labor; the Gilded Age; the British 18th century)
Jared Gardner, (Columbus Campus)
Elizabeth Hewitt, (Columbus Campus)
Robert Hughes, (Newark Campus)
Elizabeth Renker, (Columbus Campus)
Susan Williams, (Columbus Campus)

Associated Faculty

Harvey Graff, (Columbus campus; major field, literacy studies; also history of cities; history of children, youth, and families; interdisciplinarity)
Koritha Mitchell, (Columbus Campus)
Andrea Williams, (Columbus Campus)

Selected Bibliography of Our Work

Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Twilight of the Humanities (Fordham UP, 2008).
Steven Fink, Prophet in the Marketplace: Thoreau's Development as a Professional Writer (Princeton University Press, 1992); reprinted 1999.
Jared Gardner, Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature 1787-1845 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
Harvey J. Graff, Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America (Harvard University Press, 1995); The Literacy Myth: Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth-Century City (Academic Press, 1979; Transaction, 1991); The Dallas Myth: The Making and Unmaking of an American City (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
Elizabeth Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, 1770-1865 (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Robert Hughes, Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Beyond of Language (State University of New York Press, 2010)
Elizabeth Renker, The Origins of American Literature Studies: An Institutional History (Cambridge University Press, 2007); Strike Through the Mask: Herman Melville and the Scene of Writing (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Susan Williams, Reclaiming Authorship: Literary Women in America, 1850-1900 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Confounding Images: Photography and Portraiture in Antebellum American Fiction (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.