Vols. 28-30 accompanied by separately published parts with title: Indices and necrology.

From essays about the Salem witch trials to literary uses of ghosts by Twain, Wharton, and Bierce to the cinematic blockbuster The Sixth Sense, this book is the first to survey the importance of ghosts and hauntings in American culture across time. From the Puritans' conviction that a thousand preternatural beings appear every day before our eyes, to today's resurgence of spirits in fiction and film, the culture of the United States has been obsessed with ghosts. In each generation, these phantoms in popular culture reflect human anxieties about religion, science, politics, and social issues. Spectral America asserts that ghosts, whether in oral tradition, literature, or such modern forms as cinema have always been constructions embedded in specific historical contexts and invoked for explicit purposes, often political in nature. The essays address the role of "spectral evidence" during the Salem witch trials, the Puritan belief in good spirits, the convergence of American Spiritualism and technological development in the nineteenth century, the use of the supernatural as a tool of political critique in twentieth-century magic realism, and the "ghosting" of persons living with AIDS. They also discuss ghostly themes in the work of Ambrose Bierce, Edith Wharton, Gloria Naylor, and Stephen King.

Loyal Subjects considers how the Civil War complicated the cultural value of emotion, especially the ideal of sympathy.

In this provocative study, Paulette D. Kilmer examines the ways in which the national preoccupation with success and its attendant anxieties have been manifested in popular culture. Her focus is on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - an era in which industrial growth and urbanization wrought enormous changes in the country.

An unprecedented literary landmark: the first comprehensive history of American women writers from 1650 to the present. In a narrative of immense scope and fascination, here are more than 250 female writers, including the famous—Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dorothy Parker, Flannery O’Connor, and Toni Morrison, among others—and the little known, from the early American bestselling novelist Catherine Sedgwick to the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Susan Glaspell. Showalter integrates women’s contributions into our nation’s literary heritage with brilliance and flair, making the case for the unfairly overlooked and putting the overrated firmly in their place.

The "Collection of British Authors," or, as it is more popularly known on the European Continent, the "Tauchnitz Edition," was instituted in 1841, at Leipsic, by one of the most distinguished of German publishers, the late Baron Bernhard Tauchnitz, whose son is now at the head of the house. The father records that he was "incited to the undertaking by the high opinion and enthusiastic fondness which I have ever entertained for English literature: a literature springing from the selfsame root as the literature of Germany, and cultivated in the beginning by the same Saxon race.... As a German-Saxon it gave me particular pleasure to promote the literary interest of my Anglo-Saxon cousins, by rendering English literature as universally known as possible beyond the limits of the British Empire." In another place, Baron Tauchnitz describes "the mission" of his Collection to be the "spreading and strengthening the love for English literature outside of England and her Colonies." Baron Tauchnitz early felt that the general title of the series, "Collection of British Authors," was a misnomer,vi which might even give offence to an important branch of the English-speaking race; for, though Bulwer and Dickens led off in the Collection, "Pelham" being the first volume issued and "The Pickwick Papers" the second, the fourth volume, added at the beginning of the second year of publication, in 1842, was Fenimore Cooper's "The Spy," followed in the same year by a second volume of the same author. Furthermore, the year 1843 opened with Washington Irving's "Sketch Book," immediately followed by a third novel by Cooper; and, though it was not till 1850 that another American work gained admittance into this charmed circle, not fewer than three of Irving's books succeeded one another in the single twelvemonth. In 1852, Hawthorne was welcomed with "The Scarlet Letter" and Mrs.

Transatlantic Footholds: Turn-of-the-Century American Women Writers and British Reviewers analyses British reviews of American women fiction writers, essayists and poets between the periods of literary domesticity and modernism. The book demonstrates that a variety of American women writers were intelligently read in Britain during this era. British reviewers read American women as literary artists, as women and as Americans. While their notion of who counted as "women" was too limited by race and class, they eagerly read these writers for insight about how women around the world were entering debates on women’s place, the class struggle, religion, Indian policy, childrearing, and high society. In the process, by reading American women in varied ways, reviewers became hybrid and dissenting readers. The taste among British reviewers for American women’s books helped change the predominant direction that high culture flowed across the Atlantic from east-to-west to west-to-east. Britons working in London or far afield were deeply invested in the idea of "America." "America," their responses prove, is a transnational construct.