The Token and The Atlantic Souvenir, two of the most popular and successful American gift books between 1825 and 1840, balance claims about the merit and possibility of American literature and art while exploring Americans' ...

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the ways in which the daguerreotype influenced literary celebrity in the United States from the time of its invention in 1839 to the beginning of the Civil War in 1860. The ...

The dissertation shows that human agency in all its discursive manifestations is a product of entanglement with nature's materiality--its physical objects and forces and this physicality's capacity for change--and this ...