Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies

In Unsettled States, Dana Luciano and

Ivy G. Wilson present some of

the most exciting emergent scholarship in American literary and cultural

studies of the long nineteenth century. Featuring eleven essays from senior

scholars across the discipline, the book responds to recent critical challenges

to the boundaries, both spatial and temporal, that have traditionally organized

scholarship within the field. The volume considers these recent challenges to

be aftershocks of earlier revolutions in content and method, and it seeks ways

of inhabiting and amplifying the ongoing unsettledness of the field.

Written

by scholars primarily working in the minor fields of critical race and ethnic

studies, feminist and gender studies, labor studies, and queer/sexuality

studies, the essays share a minoritarian critical orientation. Minoritarian

criticism, as an aesthetic, political, and ethical project, is dedicated to finding

new connections and possibilities within extant frameworks. Unsettled States seeks to demonstrate

how the goals of minoritarian critique may be actualized without automatic

recourse to a predetermined minor location, subject, or critical approach.

Its contributors work to develop practices of reading an American

literature in motion, identifying nodes of inquiry attuned to the rhythms of a

field that is always on the move.