(Paperback)

Approaching Herman Melville as a figure caught in the politics of a nation and an "imperial self", the author aims to challenge our view by demonstrating a link between the individualism that enabled Melville to write as a sovereign author and the nationalism that allowed America to grow into what Jefferson hoped would be an "empire for liberty".

(Paperback)

In a globalizing age, studying American literature in isolation from the rest of the world seems less and less justified. But is the conceptual box of the nation dispensable And what would American literature look like without it This book takes up this debate.

(Paperback)

Argues that what we call American literature is quite often a shorthand, a simplified name for an extended tangle of relations. This book contends that American literature is answerable not to the nation-state, but to the human species as a whole and that it looks dramatically different when removed from a national or English-language context.