American Literature before 1865

Showing 1–24 of 45 results

  • Martin R. Delany: Selected Writings

    One of the most powerful and provocative voices to emerge from the social and political unrest preceding the Civil War, the abolitionist and political activist…

  • Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Selections

    Uncle Tom’s Cabin may well have excited more controversy than any other work of fiction in American history. Welcomed by many abolitionists and met with…

  • Emily Dickinson: Selected Poems and Letters

    This compact edition, designed for use in undergraduate courses, combines a substantial selection of Dickinson’s poems (including one complete fascicle) with a selection of letters…

  • Fanny Fern: Selected Writings

    Fanny Fern dominated the New York literary scene in the 1850s, garnering both esteem and, occasionally, derision for her witty and acerbic newspaper columns and…

  • Frederick Douglass: Selected Writings and Speeches

    Universally recognized today as one of the most important and influential Americans of the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass rose to prominence in the national abolitionist…

  • Letters from an American Farmer: Selections

    Letters from an American Farmer is increasingly recognized as one of the foundational texts in the study both of American literature and of American history.…

  • Moby-Dick; or, the Whale: Selections

    When Melville completed Moby-Dick, he wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne that “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as a lamb.” While it took…

  • Slaves in Algiers; or, A Struggle for Freedom

    As Americans began defining who was to be counted a citizen in their newly-established republic, Susanna Rowson’s comic opera Slaves in Algiers (1794) makes an…

  • Washington Irving: Selected Writings

    Two of Washington Irving’s works of short fiction from his 1819-20 work, The Sketch Book—Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow—are among the…

  • Only by Experience: An Anthology of Slave Narratives

    Only by Experience: An Anthology of Slave Narratives collects, in whole or in part, sixteen of the most significant and influential slave narratives in English.…

  • The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Concise Volume 1: Beginnings to Reconstruction

    About the Anthology Guided by the latest scholarship in American literary studies, and deeply committed to inclusiveness, social responsibility, and rigorous contextualization, The Broadview Anthology…

  • A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison

    A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison offers a remarkable perspective on eighteenth-century America. A white settler by birth, Mary Jemison was taken…

  • The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Volume A: Beginnings to 1820

    About the Anthology Covering American literature from its pre-contact Indigenous beginnings through the Reconstruction period, the first two volumes of The Broadview Anthology of American…

  • The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Volumes A & B: Beginnings to Reconstruction

    About the Anthology Covering American literature from its pre-contact Indigenous beginnings through the Reconstruction period, the first two volumes of The Broadview Anthology of American…

  • Benito Cereno

    “Benito Cereno,” a story of atmospheric Gothic horror and striking political resonance, represents Herman Melville’s most profound and unsettling engagement with the horrors of New…

  • The Piazza Tales

    Herman Melville’s The Piazza Tales is the only collection of short fiction that he published in his lifetime, and it includes his two most famous…

  • Edgar Huntly

    Edgar Huntly is a compelling tale of sleepwalking, murder, and frontier violence set in rural Pennsylvania in the 1780s. His memory and wits shaken by…

  • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

    Published in the bicentenary year of Frederick Douglass’s birth and in a Black Lives Matter era, this edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick…

  • Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

    Essayist, lecturer, poet, and America’s first “public intellectual,” Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) is the central figure in nineteenth-century American letters and the leader (albeit reluctantly)…

  • Ida May

    The sentimental antislavery novel Ida May appeared so like its predecessor in the genre, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that for the month of November 1854, reviewers…

  • Civil Disobedience

    In 1848, Henry David Thoreau twice delivered lectures in Concord, Massachusetts, on “the relationship of the individual to the state.” The essay now known as…

  • Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins

    The two narratives published together in The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy Those Extraordinary Twins are overflowing with spectacular events. Twain shows us…

  • Clotel

    As nearly all of its reviewers pointed out, Clotel was an audience-minded performance, an effort to capitalize on the post—Uncle Tom’s Cabin “mania” for abolitionist…

  • Kelroy

    Kelroy, a nearly-forgotten 1812 novel by Rebecca Rush, combines the refinement of the novel of manners with the Gothic novel’s hidden evil to tell the…