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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- Part I -- Letting Go Our Grand Obsessions: Notes Toward a New Literary History of the American Frontiers -- Oroonoko's Gendered Economies of Honor/Horror: Reframing Colonial Discourses Studies in the Americas -- Race and Sensibility in the Early Republic: Ann Eliza Bleecker and Sarah Wentworth Morton -- Vanishing Americans: Gender, Empire, and New Historicism -- Part II -- Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves -- Critiques from Within: Antebellum Projects of Resistance -- Radical Configurations of History in the Era of American Slavery -- White Slaves: The Mulatto Hero in Antebellum Fiction -- Part III -- Masculinity and Self-Performance in the Life ofBlack Hawk -- Constructing the Black Masculine: Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and the Sublimits of African American Autobiography -- Mark Twain and the Diseases of the Jews -- Warring Fictions: lola Leroy and the Color of Gender -- "Alien Hands": Kate Chopin and the Colonization of Race -- Part IV -- "The Direction of the Howling": Nationalism and the Color Line in Absalom, Absalom! -- Border Subjects and Transnational Sites: Americo Paredes's The Hammon and the Beans and Other Stories -- Remodeling the Model Home in Uncle Tom's Cabin and Beloved -- A Zuni Raconteur Dons the Junco Shirt: Gender and Narrative Style in the Story of Coyote and Junco -- "We Murder Who We Were": Jasmine and the Violence of Identity -- The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Anita Hill -- The Body Politic -- Index Focusing on intersecting issues of nation, race, and gender, this volume inaugurates new models for American literary and cultural history. Subjects and Citizens reveals the many ways in which a wide range of canonical and non-canonical writing contends with the most crucial social, political, and literary issues of our past and present.Defining the landscape of the New American literary history, these essays are united by three interrelated concerns: ideas of origin (where does "American literature" begin?), ideas of nation (what does "American literature" mean?), and ideas of race and gender (what does "American literature" include and exclude and how?). Work by writers as diverse as Aphra Behn, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Frances Harper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Bharati Mukherjee, Booker T. Washington, Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, Américo Paredes, and Toni Morrison are discussed from several theoretical perspectives, using a variety of methodologies. Issues of the "frontier" and the "border" as well as those of coloniality and postcoloniality are explored. In each case, these essays emphasize the ideological nature of national identity and, more specifically, the centrality of race and gender to our concept of nationhood.Collected from recent issues of American Literature, with three new essays added, Subjects and Citizens charts the new directions being taken in American literary studies.Contributors. Daniel Cooper Alarcón, Lori Askeland, Stephanie Athey, Nancy Bentley, Lauren Berlant, Michele A. Birnbaum, Kristin Carter-Sanborn, Russ Castronovo, Joan Dayan, Julie Ellison, Sander L. Gilman, Karla F. C. Holloway, Annette Kolodny, Barbara Ladd, Lora Romero, Ramón Saldívar, Maggie Sale, Siobhan Senier, Timothy Sweet, Maurice Wallace, Elizabeth Young
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