This book offers new perspectives on race and transnationalism in nineteenth-century American literary studies.

Robert S. Levine is Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Conspiracy and Romance (Cambridge, 1989), Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (1997), Dislocating Race and Nation (2008), and The Lives of Frederick Douglass (2016), and the editor of over twenty volumes, He is the General Editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Levine has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2014, the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association awarded him the Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literary Studies.

Introduction; 1. Reading slavery and race in 'classic' American literature; 2. Temporality, race, and empire in Cooper's The Deerslayer: the beginning of the end; 3. Fifth of July: Nathaniel Paul and the circulatory routes of black nationalism; 4. American studies in an age of extinction: Poe, Hawthorne, Katrina; 5. The slave narrative and the revolutionary tradition of African American autobiography; 6. 'Whiskey, blacking, and all': temperance and race in William Wells Brown's Clotel; 7. Beautiful warships: the transnational aesthetics of Melville's Israel Potter; 8. Antebellum Rome: transatlantic mirrors in Hawthorne's The Marble Faun; 9. Edward Everett Hale's and Sutton E. Griggs's Men without a Country; 10. Frederick Douglass in fiction: from Harriet Beecher Stowe to James McBride; Notes.