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This Special Collection is inspired by substantial changes over the past fifteen years in the way scholars have engaged with US literature and culture. In particular, the rise of two methodological paradigms, transnationalism and print culture studies, have paved the way for exciting new approaches to key questions that have always been at the heart of the discipline: the relationship between literature and nationhood, the role of writing in international circuits of knowledge and commodity exchange, and the artistic labour of the author. The aim of the collection is to reflect on the history of international markets, copyright, and the book trade as shaping forces in American literature and culture. Literary-historical articles were invited to consider the entire history of the United States from the earliest instances of print culture in the colonies, to the market revolution of the nineteenth century and contemporary digital media and new publishing or distribution formats.

Edited by Michael J. Collins (University of Kent)

Featured image by Peter Trimming under a CC BY license


American Literature and the Transnational Marketplace

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Special Collections