Each entry, or chapter, focuses on one work in contemporary literature. The following elements are contained in each entry: Introduction, Author Biography, Plot Summary, Characters, Themes, Style, Historical and Cultural Context, Critical Overview, Sources, For Further Study, Criticism, Media Adaptations, Compare and Contrast Box, What Do I Read Next?, and Study Questions. Each volume is indexed by author, title, nationality/ethnicity, and includes a glossary of literary terms.
Nineteenth-century America was a sprawling new nation unmoored from precedent and the mainstays of European nationalism. In their search for nationality, Americans sought coherence in a feeling of belonging shared among diverse and scattered strangers. Reading seminal works by Thomas Jefferson, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Walt Whitman, Peter Coviello traces these writers' enthusiasms and their ambivalences about the dream of an intimate nationality, revealing how race and sexuality were used as vehicles for an assumed national coherence.
