Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History illuminates how literary experimentation with natural history provides penumbral views of environmental survival. The book brings together feminist revisions of scientific objectivity and critical race theory on diaspora to show how biogeography influenced material and metaphorical concepts of species and race. It also highlights how lesser known writers of color like Simon Pokagon and James McCune Smith connected species migration and mutability to forms of racial uplift. The book situates these literary visions of environmental fragility and survival amidst the development of Darwinian theories of evolution and against a westward expanding American settler colonialism.

During the Revolution a nine-year-old black slave girl is given the task of blowing up ammunition stored in the British barracks in Charleston.

Nineteenth-century American literature is often divided into two asymmetrical halves, neatly separated by the Civil War. Focusing on the later writings of Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson, this book shows how the war took shape across the nineteenth century, inflecting literary forms for decades after 1865.

Removals addresses the relationship between the national debates on the establishment of a federal Indian policy in the first half of the nineteenth century and the simultaneous debates on the establishment of an unofficial policy governing the production of an American literature. Maddox rereads the work of writers including Herman Melville, Catherine Sedgewick, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and Francis Parkman within the; context of the public debates on 'the Indian question' in order to illustrate the ways in which they respond to the political, social, and aesthetic issues raised by these debates.

In a bold revision of traditional historical narratives, Pratt analyzes nineteenth-century American literature to disclose the competing temporalities and racial identities that in fact defined the antebellum period.