Increasing specialization within the discipline of English and American Studies has shifted the focus of scholarly discussion toward theoretical reflection and cultural contexts. These developments have benefitted the discipline in more ways than one, but they have also resulted in a certain neglect of close reading. As a result, students and researchers interested in such material are forced to turn to scholarship from the 1960s and 1970s, much of which relies on dated methodological and ideological presuppositions. The handbook aims to fill this gap by providing new readings of texts that figure prominently in the literature classroom and in scholarly debate from James's The Ambassadors to McCarthy's The Road. These readings do not revert naively to a time "before theory." Instead, they distil the insights of literary and cultural theory into concise introductions to the historical background, the themes, the formal strategies, and the reception of influential literary texts, and they do so in a jargon-free language accessible to readers on all levels of qualification.

Questions of genres as well as their possible definitions, taxonomies, and functions have been discussed since antiquity. Even though categories of genre today are far from being fixed, they have for decades been upheld without question. The goal of this volume is to problematize traditional definitions of poetic genres and to situate them in a broader socio-cultural, historical, and theoretical context. The contributions encompass numerous methodological approaches (including hermeneutics, poststructuralism, reception theory, cultural studies, gender studies), periods (Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism), genres (elegy, sonnet, visual poetry, performance poetry, hip hop) as well as languages and national literatures. From this interdisciplinary and multi-methodological perspective, genres, periods, languages, and literatures are put into fruitful dialogue, new perspectives are discovered, and suggestions for further research are provided.

Questions of genres as well as their possible definitions, taxonomies, and functions have been discussed since antiquity. Even though categories of genre today are far from being fixed, they have for decades been upheld without question. The goal of this volume is to problematize traditional definitions of poetic genres and to situate them in a broader socio-cultural, historical, and theoretical context. The contributions encompass numerous methodological approaches (including hermeneutics, poststructuralism, reception theory, cultural studies, gender studies), periods (Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism), genres (elegy, sonnet, visual poetry, performance poetry, hip hop) as well as languages and national literatures. From this interdisciplinary and multi-methodological perspective, genres, periods, languages, and literatures are put into fruitful dialogue, new perspectives are discovered, and suggestions for further research are provided.

Some of the best known African American poems are sonnets: Claude McKay's "If We Must Die," Countee Cullen's "Yet Do I Marvel," Gwendolyn Brooks's "First fight. Then fiddle." Yet few readers realize that these poems are part of a rich tradition that formed after the Civil War and comprises more than a thousand sonnets by African American poets. Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, and Rita Dove all wrote sonnets.Based on extensive archival research, The African American Sonnet: A Literary History traces this forgotten tradition from the nineteenth century to the present. Timo Muller uses sonnets to open up fresh perspectives on African American literary history. He examines the struggle over the legacy of the Civil War, the trajectories of Harlem Renaissance protest, the tensions between folk art and transnational perspectives in the thirties, the vernacular modernism of the postwar period, the cultural nationalism of the Black Arts movement, and disruptive strategies of recent experimental poetry. In this book, Muller examines the inventive strategies African American poets devised to occupy and reshape a form overwhelmingly associated with Europe. In the tightly circumscribed space of sonnets, these poets mounted evocative challenges to the discursive and material boundaries they confronted.