Unsettled States

In Unsettled States, Dana Luciano andIvy G. Wilson present some ofthe most exciting emergent scholarship in American literary and culturalstudies of the “long” nineteenth century. Featuring eleven essays from seniorscholars across the discipline, the book responds to recent critical challengesto the boundaries, both spatial and temporal, that have traditionally organizedscholarship within the field. The volume considers these recent challenges tobe aftershocks of earlier revolutions in content and method, and it seeks waysof inhabiting and amplifying the ongoing unsettledness of the field.Writtenby scholars primarily working in the “minor” fields of critical race and ethnicstudies, feminist and gender studies, labor studies, and queer/sexualitystudies, the essays share a minoritarian critical orientation. Minoritariancriticism, as an aesthetic, political, and ethical project, is dedicated to findingnew connections and possibilities within extant frameworks. Unsettled States seeks to demonstratehow the goals of minoritarian critique may be actualized without automaticrecourse to a predetermined “minor” location, subject, or critical approach.Its contributors work to develop practices of reading an “Americanliterature” in motion, identifying nodes of inquiry attuned to the rhythms of afield that is always on the move.

Innovative and thought-provoking, this collection will be of broad interest, opening up discussions on an array of texts, critical approaches, and developing conversations in the study of of nineteenth-century literature. With essays that are accessible, lucid, and utterly fascinating,Unsettled Statesoffers arresting analyses andmakes a real contributionto the field., Unsettled Statessheds light on the papers long swept under the rug ranging from early Hispanic literature to polar periodicals. More importantly, the authors of the articles conscientiously build up their discussions in relation to contemporary literature and critical theory, which makes the collection even more distinguishing and valuable for the twenty-first century reader.

Dana Luciano is Associate Professor of English and Women's & Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (2007), which won the 2008 MLA Prize for a First Book. She co-edited, with Ivy G. Wilson, Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (2014), and “Queer Inhumanisms,” a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, with Mel Y. Chen (2015). Ivy G. Wilson is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Program in American Studies at Northwestern University. His most recent book is Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Politics in the Antebellum U.S.