In this first-of-its-kind treatment, Heinz Tschachler offers an account of Edgar Allan Poe's relation to the world of banking and money in antebellum America. He contends that Poe gave the full force of his censure to the acrimonious debates about America's money, Andrew Jackson's bank war, the panic of 1837 and the ensuing depression, and the nation's inability to furnish a ""sound and uniform currency."" Poe's censure is overt in his early satires, more subdued in ""The Gold-Bug,"" and almost an undercurrent in writings that enter into and historicise the discovery of gold in California. In Poe's writings much is concealed, though his art also reveals while it conceals--in this instance, a deep felt desire for an authority that would guarantee a measure of permanence and continuity to the nation's currency. That kind of currency was finally furnished by Abraham Lincoln (both were born in 1809; Poe died in 1849), at one time a dedicated reader of Poe's tales and sketches. Wielding his ""power of regulation,"" Lincoln came to save the Union not just militarily but also economically. Under him, the United States government finally provided the kind of ""sound and uniform currency"" that Poe in his writings could only name and rehearse.

George Washington has been the most popular and widely used subject on coins, medals, tokens, paper money, and postage stamps in America. Attempts on the part of America's lawmakers to eliminate one-dollar bills from circulation, replacing them with coins, have been unsuccessful. The reasons for Americans' reluctance to part with their beloved "Georges" are beyond rational economic considerations, though, tapping into deep-felt emotions. To discard one-dollar bills and to replace them with another form of currency means discarding the metaphorical Father of His Country. Alexander Hamilton, the nation's first Secretary of the Treasury, said that monetary tokens were "vehicles of useful impressions." This numismatic history of George Washington traces examines why his image remains so persistent on American currency. Since the images used were mostly copied from late eighteenth-century paintings and prints, Washington's numismatic legacy is complemented with a close look at the pictorial tradition in which these images were rooted.

Almighty Dollar brings together papers and lectures from the 35th International Annual Conference of the Austrian Association for American Studies (AAAS). The conference took place at the very time that the United States and world economies were plunging downward. However, money has never been simply an economic issue; it has also always been a cultural one, conveying complex historical, social and political meanings. Contributions consider people's engagements with the "Almighty Dollar" from the most ordinary, mundane daily practices to the most extra-ordinary, life-changing ones. They deal with these engagements in literature, the arts, film, and popular culture.

Over two hundred years after his death, George Washington is still often considered the metaphorical father of the United States. Washington was first known as the "Father of His Country" during his lifetime, when the American people bestowed the title upon him as a symbolic act of resistance and rebirth. Since then, presidents have stood as paternal figureheads for America, often serving as moral beacons. This book tracks political fatherhood throughout world history, from the idea of the pater patriae in Roman antiquity to Martin Luther's Bible translations and beyond. Often using George Washington as a paradigm, this book explores presidential iconography in the U.S., propaganda and the role of paternal rhetoric in shaping American sociopolitical history--including the results of the 2016 presidential election.

The first part of this book presents cultural studies including: Overweight Subjectivities and Resistances; Penis Envy, Aesthetic Autoplasty and Genital Reconstruction; the Pierced and Tattoed Body; Bruce Springsteen's Working-Class Masculinity in the 1980s; and Demonic Images of Food, Bodies and the Desire to Eat. The second part focuses on textual studies such as: the Repulsive and Eroticized Bodies of Djuna Barnes; the "Feminine" Body in Modern American Poetry; the Surrender of the Body in Mary Oliver and Amy Clampitt's Ecopoetry; Violence in American Opera and Tod Browning's "Freaks."
Heinz Tschachler is Professor for American Studies at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria.
Maureen Devine is researcher at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria.
Michael Draxlbauer is researcher at the University of Vienna.

Washington Irving remains one of the most recognized American authors of the nineteenth century, remembered for short stories like Rip van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. He also accomplished other writing feats, including penning George Washington's biography and other life stories. Throughout his life, Irving was at odds with socially-approved ways of "being a man." Irving purportedly saw himself and was seen by others as feminine, shy, and non-confrontational. Likely related to this, he chose to engage with other men's fortunes and adventures by writing, defining his male identity vicariously, through masculine archetypes both fictional and non-fictional. Sitting at the intersection of literary studies and masculinity studies, this reading reconstructs Irving's life-long struggle to somehow win a place among other men. Readers will recognize masculine themes in his tales from the Spanish period, his western adventures, as well as in historical biographies of Columbus, Mahomet, and Washington. In many writings by Irving, especially The Legend of Sleepy Hallow, readers will observe themes dominated by masculinity. The book is the first of its kind to encompass and examine Irving's writings.