Transatlantic Footholds: Turn-of-the-Century American Women Writers and British Reviewers analyses British reviews of American women fiction writers, essayists and poets between the periods of literary domesticity and modernism. The book demonstrates that a variety of American women writers were intelligently read in Britain during this era. British reviewers read American women as literary artists, as women and as Americans. While their notion of who counted as "women" was too limited by race and class, they eagerly read these writers for insight about how women around the world were entering debates on women’s place, the class struggle, religion, Indian policy, childrearing, and high society. In the process, by reading American women in varied ways, reviewers became hybrid and dissenting readers. The taste among British reviewers for American women’s books helped change the predominant direction that high culture flowed across the Atlantic from east-to-west to west-to-east. Britons working in London or far afield were deeply invested in the idea of "America." "America," their responses prove, is a transnational construct.

The relationship between the United States and Spain evolved rapidly over the course of the nineteenth century, culminating in hostility during the Spanish–American War. However, scholarship on literary connections between the two nations has been limited aside from a few studies of the small coterie of Hispanists typically conceived as the canon in this area. This volume collects essays that push the study of transatlantic connections between U.S. and Spanish literatures in new directions. The contributors represent an interdisciplinary group including scholars of national literatures, national histories, and comparative literature. Their works explore previously understudied authors as well as understudied works by better-known authors. They use these new archives to present canonical works in new lights. Moreover, they explore organic entanglements between the literary traditions, and how those raditions interface with Latinx literary history.

This is the first book-length study to read women of the Beat Generation as feminist writers. The book focuses on one author from each of the three generations that comprise the groups of female writers associated with the Beats – Diane di Prima, ruth weiss and Anne Waldman – as well as on experimental and multimedia artists, such as Laurie Anderson and Kathy Acker, who have not been read through the prism of Beat feminism before. This book argues that these writers’ feminism evolved over time but persistently focussed on intertextuality, transformation, revisionism, gender, interventionist poetics and activism. It demonstrates how these Beat feminisms counteract the ways in which women have been undermined, possessed or silenced.

Ambivalent Transnational Belonging in American Literature discusses the extent to which transnational concepts of identity and community are cast within nationalist frameworks. It analyzes how the different narrative perspectives in texts by Olaudah Equiano, Catharina Maria Sedgwick, Henry James, Jamaica Kincaid, and Mohsin Hamid shape protagonists’ complex transnational subjectivities, which exist between or outside national frameworks but are nevertheless interpellated through the nation-state and through particular myths about liberal, sentimental, or cosmopolitan subjects. The notion of ambivalent transnational belonging yields insights into the affective appeal of the transnational as a category of analysis, as an aesthetic experience, and as an idea of belonging. This means bringing the transnational into conversation with the aesthetic and the affective so we may fully address the new conceptual challenges faced by literary studies due to the transnational turn in American studies.

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930) was one of the most popular American writers at the turn of the twentieth century, and her annual Christmas stories appeared in magazines and periodicals across the globe. Since then, the extraordinary stories that once delighted her legions of fans every festive season have gone largely out of print and unread. Now, for the first time, The Last Gift presents a collection of Freeman’s best Christmas writing, introducing these funny, poignant, provocative, and surprisingly timely holiday tales to a new generation of readers.