In this companion volume to Animals in the American Classics: How Natural History Inspired Great Fiction, John Cullen Gruesser brings together leading experts who explore the integral role animals play in American poetry. The ten essays in Animals in Classic American Poetry: How Natural History Inspired Great Verse showcase how the natural history of and imagery relating to animals have inspired some of America’s best-known and most beloved poets.The book highligh...

This collection explores how anthologizers and editors of Edgar Allan Poe play an integral role in shaping our conceptions of Poe as the author we have come to recognize, revere, and critique today. In the spheres of literature and popular culture, Poe wields more global influence than any other U.S. author. This influence, however, cannot be attributed solely to the quality of Poe’s texts or to his compellingly tragic biography. Rather, his continued prominence as a writer owes much to th...

As defined by conservation biologist Thomas Fleishner, natural history is “a practice of intentional, focused receptivity to the more-than-human world . . . one of the oldest continuous human traditions.” Seldom is this idea so clearly reflected as in classic works of American fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.John Cullen Gruesser’s edited volume Animals in the American Classics: How Natural History Inspired Great Fiction features essays by prominent litera...

The Midwest has produced a robust literary heritage. Its authors have won half of the nation's Nobel Prizes for Literature plus a significant number of Pulitzer Prizes. This volume explores the rich racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of the region. It also contains entries on 35 pivotal Midwestern literary works, literary genres, literary, cultural, historical, and social movements, state and city literatures, literary journals and magazines, as well as entries on science fiction, film...

Winner of the Poe Studies Association’s 2025 J. Lasley Dameron Award for an Outstanding Essay Collection on PoeThis edited volume examines the life, works, and influence of Edgar Allan Poe from a variety of critical, biographical, and literary-historical perspectives through diverse lenses of spatiality. Eighteen contributions offer spatially-oriented investigations of the critical, intellectual, cultural, philosophical, and political spaces wherein Poe defined him...

This collection of fifteen original essays and one original poem explores the theme of “place” in the life, works, and afterlife of Edgar A. Poe (1809-1849). Poe and Place argues that “place” is an important critical category through which to understand this classic American author in new and interesting ways. The geographical “places” examined include the cities in which Poe lived and worked, specific locales included in his fictional works, imaginary places featured in his writi...