Matthew A. Taylor is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

"Universes without Us provides incisive and illuminating readings of a wide range of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American literature. This book helps us to reconceive American literature through its compelling connections and intersections and to rethink the place of the human in American literature through its reconstruction of both pessimistic visions of a universe without us in Poe and Adams and potentially more livable posthuman existences through African-American literature." -Paul Gilmore, author of The Genuine Article: Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood

• ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Immortal Post-Mortems1. Edgar Allan Poe’s Meta/Physics2. Henry Adams’s Half-Life: The Science of Autobiography3. “By an Act of Self-Creation”: On Becoming Human in America4. Hoodoo You Think You Are?: Self-Conjuration in Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman5. “It Might Be the Death of You”: Hurston’s Voodoo EthnographyCoda: “The Cosmo-Political Party”NotesIndex

Matthew A. Taylor is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

"Universes without Us provides incisive and illuminating readings of a wide range of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American literature. This book helps us to reconceive American literature through its compelling connections and intersections and to rethink the place of the human in American literature through its reconstruction of both pessimistic visions of a universe without us in Poe and Adams and potentially more livable posthuman existences through African-American literature." -Paul Gilmore, author of The Genuine Article: Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood

• ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Immortal Post-Mortems1. Edgar Allan Poe’s Meta/Physics2. Henry Adams’s Half-Life: The Science of Autobiography3. “By an Act of Self-Creation”: On Becoming Human in America4. Hoodoo You Think You Are?: Self-Conjuration in Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman5. “It Might Be the Death of You”: Hurston’s Voodoo EthnographyCoda: “The Cosmo-Political Party”NotesIndex

Matthew A. Taylor is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

"Universes without Us provides incisive and illuminating readings of a wide range of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American literature. This book helps us to reconceive American literature through its compelling connections and intersections and to rethink the place of the human in American literature through its reconstruction of both pessimistic visions of a universe without us in Poe and Adams and potentially more livable posthuman existences through African-American literature." -Paul Gilmore, author of The Genuine Article: Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood

• ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Immortal Post-Mortems1. Edgar Allan Poe’s Meta/Physics2. Henry Adams’s Half-Life: The Science of Autobiography3. “By an Act of Self-Creation”: On Becoming Human in America4. Hoodoo You Think You Are?: Self-Conjuration in Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman5. “It Might Be the Death of You”: Hurston’s Voodoo EthnographyCoda: “The Cosmo-Political Party”NotesIndex