Selected Studies in Romantic and American Literature, History, and Culture

Gathered together for the first time, the essays in this volume were selected to give scholars ready access to important late-twentieth and early twenty-first-century contributions to scholarship on the Romantic period and twentieth-century literature and culture. Included are Charles J. Rzepka's award-winning essays on Keats' "Chapman's Homer" sonnet and Wordsworth's "Michael" and his critical intervention into anachronistic readings related to the circumstances surrounding the writing of 'Tintern Abbey'. Other Romantic period essays provide innovative readings of De Quincey's "Three-Fingered Jack" and the anti-slavery movement. Genre is highlighted in Rzepka's exploration of race and region in Charlie Chan, while his interdisciplinary essay on The Wizard of Oz and the New Woman takes the reader on a journey that encompasses the Oz of L. Frank Baum and Victor Fleming as well as the professional lives of Judy Garland and Liza Minelli. Taken together, the essays provide not only a career retrospective of an influential scholar and teacher but a map of the innovations and controversies that have influenced literary studies from the early 1980s to the present. As Peter Manning observes in the foreword, 'this collection shows that even in diverse essays the force of a curious and disciplined mind makes itself felt'.