Behandelt auf S. 120-152 Charles Sealsfield.

Taking his cue from Philadelphia-born novelist Charles Brockden Brown's Annals of Europe and America, which contends that America is shaped most noticeably by the international struggle between Great Britain and France for control of the world trade market, Stephen Shapiro charts the advent, decline, and reinvigoration of the early American novel. That the American novel "sprang so unexpectedly into published existence during the 1790s" may be a symptom of the beginning of the end of Franco-British supremacy and a reflection of the power of a middle class riding the crest of a new world economic system. Shapiro's world-systems approach is a relatively new methodology for literary studies, but it brings two particularly useful features to the table. First, it refines the conceptual frameworks for analyzing cultural and social history, such as the rise in sentimentalism, in relation to a long-wave economic history of global commerce; second, it fosters a new model for a comparative American Studies across time. Rather than relying on contiguous time, a world-systems approach might compare the cultural production of one region to another at the same location within the recurring cycle in an economic reconfiguration. Shapiro offers a new way of thinking about the causes for the emergence of the American novel that suggests a fresh way of rethinking the overall paradigms shaping American Studies.

In Citizens in a Strange Land, Hermann Wellenreuther examines the broadsides—printed single sheets—produced by the Pennsylvania German community. These broadsides covered topics ranging from local controversies and politics to devotional poems and hymns. Each one is a product of and reaction to a particular historical setting. To understand them fully, Wellenreuther systematically reconstructs Pennsylvania’s print culture, the material conditions of life, the problems German settlers faced, the demands their communities made on the individual settlers, the complications to be overcome, and the needs to be satisfied. He shows how these broadsides provided advice, projections, and comment on phases of life from cradle to grave.

This fourth volume continues a series emerging from the Penn State Project on Anglo-German and American-German Literary and Cultural Relations. All articles contained in the volume focus on the theme of the Project and reflect the wealth of scholarly resources to be found in the Allison-Shelley Collection, located in the Pattee Library of The Pennsylvania State University. Contents: Goethe in the American Annuals and Gift-Books, Philip Allison Shelley; John Quincy Adams and Alexander Hill Everett: Pathfinders of German Studies in America, Walter J. Morris; Alexander Hill Everett: Early Advocate of American Interest in German Literature and Culture, Kenneth B. Hunsaker and Maureen C. Devine; Henry Edwin Dwight: Evocator of American Interest in Germany, Kenneth B. Hunsaker; Thomas Medwin: Intermediary of German Literature and Culture, Heimy Taylor; The German Experience of William and Mary Howitt, William Stupp; James Lorimer Graham: Fosterer of American-German Literary Rela Andrew M. Kovalecs; Adolf Strodtmann's Letters to Bayard Taylor: A Further Fostering of German-American Relations, Edward J. Danis; Publications of Philip Allison Shelley, Edward J. Danis; Index