The Handbook of American Romanticism presents a comprehensive survey of the various schools, authors, and works that constituted antebellum literature in the United States. The volume is designed to feature a selection of representative case studies and to assess them within two complementary frameworks: the most relevant historical, political, and institutional contexts of the antebellum decades and the consequent (re-)appropriations of the Romantic period by academic literary criticism in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Tackling topics such as globalization and political activism, this book traces engaged poetics in 20th century American poetry. Spahr provides a comprehensive view of activist poetry, starting with the Great Depression and the Harlem Renaissance and moving to the Beats and contemporary writers such as Amiri Baraka and Mark Nowak.

American Romanticism, Education, and Social Reform: The Great Work of Mutual Education focuses on three Romantic educational genres and their institutional and media contexts: the conversation, literary journalism, and the public lecture. The genres discussed in this book illustrate the ways in which the Transcendentalists engaged nineteenth-century media and educational institutions in order to fully realize their projects. The book also charts the development from the semi-public conversational platforms such as Alcott's Temple School and Fuller's conversation for women in the 1830s to the increasingly public periodical culture and lecture platforms of the 1840s and the early 1850s. This expansion caused a reconsideration of the meaning and function of Romanticism. The 1830s and 1840s saw a redefinition of what Romantic literary practice was. As the Romantics' attempt to institutionalize and popularize their educational ideals increasingly involved them in the institutional structures of the nineteenth-century educational field, they encountered the exclusionary mechanisms which limited educational opportunities, just as much as they had to come to terms with their own role in an educational system which recreated social privilege.

In den angloamerikanischen wie auch in den deutschsprachigen Kulturwissenschaften haben sich in den letzten Jahren kontextorientierte Forschungsparadigmen etabliert. Trotz oder gerade wegen der Vielfalt der Publikationen in diesem Feld ist eine terminologische Unscharfe eingetreten, die die Beitrage des Bandes kritisch bilanzieren. Der Band bezweckt die in den Kulturwissenschaften vorherrschende Leitdifferenz zwischen Text und Kontext aus transdisziplinarer Perspektive neu zu sichten."