This book is about the relationship of the American writer to his land and language - to the 'scene' and the 'sign', to the natural landscape and the inscriptions imposed upon it by men. Among the questions considered in the first section of the book are how does American Romantic writing differ from European; what are the peculiar problems faced by the American artist, and what roles does he adopt to tackle them; what kind of writing results when authors as different as Henry Adams and Mark Twain lament the vanishing of an earlier America, or when Adams and Henry James review their complex relationship to their homeland, or when W. D. Howells and Stephen Crane seek to define their themes in a specifically American setting. The second section of the book examines similar concerns in a number of contemporary writers, notably Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, John DeLillo, and William Gass.

We are so used to images of words that it is easy to ignore the different ways in which they work in films. This book explores both the letters that come in the post and the many other kinds that are offered to us on screen.

American literature has long celebrated the figure of the self-made man and the idea of establishing selfhood, particularly male selfhood, in nature. However, during the crisis of masculinity that swept across America in the middle of the twentieth century, a generation of writers started exploring a different kind of a man. This was a figure who was concerned not so much with the loss of the West or the desire to recover a wilderness, but with how to live in an ordinary, domesticated continent. Masculinity and Place in American Literature since 1950 explores the role of place in negotiating, reinforcing, and subverting articulations of hegemonic masculinity in the work of four American writers from the latter part of the 20th century—John Cheever, John Updike, Raymond Carver, and Richard Ford. The book argues that American fiction by white male writers between the 1950s and the present day is compelled by the troubled and troubling relationship between masculinity and place. This relationship is deeply embedded in how ideals of masculinity are predicated upon the experience of the physical world, and how the symbolic logic of masculinity is continually subverted by alternative conceptions of dwelling and ecological consciousness.

Romantic Dialogues, first published in 2000, contributed to the modern recovery of a transatlantic dimension in literary studies. Part 1 of the book reassesses the events of 1776 as a painful amputation, severing one part of a close-knit republican community from the other. It looks at English visions of America, from Blake’s America, to Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, and at Romantic Americans such Samuel Williams, William Ellery Channing, Gilbert Imlay and Estwick Evans, who absorbed England’s Romantic revolution long before America’s literary awakening took place. It considers, also, the periodical wars that followed the War of 1812, America’s aspiration to an intellectual emancipation to match its political independence; and the kinds of continuing relationship with ‘the old home’ to be found in James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody.Part 2 explores numerous barely recognised transactions between English Romantic poets and the canonical writers of the ‘American Renaissance’. Starting with Cooper’s struggle with Edmund Burke in The Pioneers, it places Emerson’s Nature, Thoreau’s Walden, the romances of Poe and Hawthorne, Melville’s Moby-Dick and Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’, in an Atlantic context. These writers still had English ears: inheriting the blissful dawn that took place in England between Blake’s Songs and Wordsworth’s Prelude, they amplified the English poets’ celebration of nature, liberty and imagination—and ‘human nature seeming born again’—but, equally Romantically, they came to mourn the fatal compromises in America’s experimental polity. Diverging somewhat from these themes, this edition includes a new chapter on William Cullen Bryant and an Epilogue on how the prosody of Whitman and Dickinson responded to the music of Tennyson, whose songs, Whitman memorably said, entered into the American character ‘inland and far West, out in Missouri, in Kansas, and away in Oregon, in farmer’s house and miner’s cabin’. Reviews:‘How this study is received will say as much about the recovery of serious interest in literary history as about the work’s quality. Learned, rigorous in testing its assertions, mordant and spirited in its expression, Romantic Dialogues makes an important claim: that American Literature of the nineteenth century knowingly attempted to fulfill the visionary promises of British Romanticism… What was reborn in the American Renaissance he writes, was ‘as much Romanticism as America’. It is as if in the works of Whitman and Melville the ghosts of Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge were posing a British alternative to Victorian conservatisms.… He makes one wonder how one ever read the American text at all without the British context. …. An extraordinary achievement…This is real work’ —Robert Weisbuch, New England Quarterly:‘Challenging the conventional notion that American literature emerged from Emerson’s early essays, Gravil positions Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge as its true progentitors: just as Locke’s libertarian political writings bore their greatest fruit in Jefferson’s famous manifesto, so the English romantics’ most characteristic notions of liberty and selfhood were fulfilled in the United States and its literature. … Gravil’s deft and learned application of key texts in British Romanticism to works by Thoreau, Melville, Dickinson, Whitman and Hawthorne powerfully challenge the easy presumption of an autochtonous American writing.’ —Kurt Eisen, American Literature‘ ... a major study, alert to and at home with textual nuance and larger questions … persuasively proving and describing a series of intricate, intertextual relationships: Gravil allows for uniqueness and difference; there is no ‘Englishing’ of his American authors, but a brimmingly revelatory stream of suggested connections. Romantic Dialogues is a ground-breaking study which bears witness to a generous, vigilant, and witty critical intelligence.’ —Michael O’Neill , Symbiosis

The increasing centrality of memory to work being done across a wide range of disciplines has brought along with it vexed questions and far-reaching changes in the way knowledge is pursued. This timely collection provides a forum for demonstrating how various disciplines are addressing these concerns. Is an historian's approach to memory similar to that of theorists in media or cultural studies, or are their understandings in fact contradictory? Which methods of analysis are most appropriate in which contexts? What are the relations between individual and social memory? Why should we study memory and how can it enrich other research? What does its study bring to our understanding of subjectivity, identity and power? In addressing these knotty questions, Memory and Methodology showcases a rich and diverse range of research on memory. Leading scholars in anthropology, history, film and cultural studies address topics including places of memory; trauma, film and popular memory; memory texts; collaborative memory work and technologies of memory. This timely and interdisciplinary study represents a major contribution to our understanding of how memory is shaping contemporary academic research and of how people shape and are shaped by memory.