Table of Contents

Introduction: What Is Method and Why DoesIt Matter?Part One: History and Literature in America 1 Domesticating Virtue: Coquettes and Revolutionaries in Young America2 Vanishing Americans: Gender, Empire, and New Historicism3 Seeing Sentiment: Photography, Race, and the Innocent Eye4 The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Anita Hill Part Two: Reading "Culture" 5 Mass Culture/Popular Culture: Notes for a Humanist's Primer6 Dancing for Eels at Catherine Market 7 AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signi?cation8 The Occult of True Black Womanhood Part Three: Nationalism Reconsidered9 The Mass Public and the Mass Subject10 Traditional Narrative: Contemporary Uses, Historical Perspectives 11 The Stakes of Textual Border-Crossing: Hualing Nieh's Mulberry and Peach in Sinocentric, Asian American, and Feminist Critical Practices12 Americanization: What Are We Talking About?

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Leading scholars discuss strategies and methodology in American literary studies.

About the Author

Michael A. Elliott is Assistant Professor of English at Emory University. He is the author of The Culture Concept: Writing and Difference in Realist America. Claudia Stokes is Assistant Professor of English at Trinity University.

Reviews

""Loca Motion" is a work of intelligent exuberance. Michelle Habell-Pallan has the eyes, ears, and heart to read popular performance, culture, and music as the new archives of Chicana and Latina transnational and translocal histories."
-Lisa Lowe, UC San Diego

"Forget about Ricky Martin and Shakira, here come El Vez and Marga Gomez. Habell-Pallan has produced a highly original study of Chicano/Latino popular culture and of its local, national and international dimensions by taking us into the world of alternative and experimental Chicano/Latino art."
-Arlene Davila, author of "Barrio Dreams"

"Offers insight into the dynamics of race, class, gender and sexuality."
-"Hispanic LInk Weekly Report",