This book examines the widespread use of postapocalyptic fantasies in American literary texts in the early nineteenth century.

Even before the Civil War, American writers were imagining life after a massive global catastrophe. For many, the blank slate of the American continent was inst

The idea of America has always encouraged apocalyptic visions. The 'American Dream' has not only imagined the prospect of material prosperity; it has also imagi

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History illuminates how literary experimentation with natural history provides penumbral vie

Liberalism and American Literature in the Clinton Era argues that a new, post-postmodern aesthetic emerges in the 1990s as a group of American writers – inclu