Russ Castronovo is Tom Paine Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  He has published widely on American literature on topics such as democracy, citizenship, and aesthetics. He is author and editor of ten books, including most recently American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability (2023) and Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America (2014). He is co-editor of the journal American Literary History. Robert S. Levine is Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Maryland. His most recent books are The Lives of Frederick Douglass (2016), Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (2018), and The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson (2021). He has won NEH Fellowships and a Guggenheim. He is the General Editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature.

• Introduction: taking stock and new directions Russ Castronovo and Robert S. Levine; 1. Harriet Wilson's lessons: disability and nineteenth-century American literature Sari Altschuler; 2. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the new Civil war literary studies Colleen Glenney Goggs; 3. The Global South: a speculative exercise Katharine A. Burnett; 4. 'Making it new: William Cullen Bryant's Iliad and postbellum poetics' Michael C. Cohen; 5. Law, Nineteenth-Century American literary studies, and the black formalist tradition Jeannine Marie DeLombard; 6. Conjuring Nineteenth-Century black environmentalism Erin Forbes; 7. Transitioning queer studies in Nineteenth-Century American literature Ren Heintz; 8. New materialisms and scalar collapse in Nineteenth-Century American literary studies Paul Hurh; 9. Nineteenth-Century Spanish-language textbooks and US American literature Carmen E. Lamas; 10. The political functions of reconstruction literature, then and now Gregory Laski; 11. Echoes from the past, archives of the future: Latinx Authors and Spanish-language print culture Rodrigo Lazo and Gretchen Murphy; 12. A periodical Masquerade: the History of the Book in Nineteenth-Century America, unbound Matthew Pethers; 13. Tasteful sketches and tasteless ambition: rethinking the place of the sketch in Nineteenth-Century US Literature Claudia Stokes; 14. Grounding Nineteenth-Century studies in indigenous studies Kathryn Walkiewicz and Kelley Wisecup; 15. Cultures of data: literature and the quantitative turn Edward Whitley; 16. Rethinking critical geographies: transamerican studies, the pacific, and the Nineteenth-Century United States Maria A. Windell; 17. Rethinking black speculative fiction: the example of Charles Chesnutt Autumn Womack; 18. The black pacific: new directions in race and transnationalism Edlie Wong; 19. 'Unfeeling Stone': rethinking sentimentality at the heart of Nineteenth-Century American literary studies Xine Yao; Index.