American Literature before 1865
Showing 1–24 of 45 results
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Coming SoonFanny 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…
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Coming SoonOnly By Experience: An Anthology of Slave Narratives
The historical and literary importance that slave narratives—the autobiographical accounts written by formerly enslaved people in the United States and throughout the Atlantic world in…
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Coming SoonWashington 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…
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Coming SoonMoby-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…
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Coming SoonFrederick 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…
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Coming SoonLetters 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.…
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Coming SoonSlaves 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…
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Coming SoonEmily 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…
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Coming SoonMartin 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…
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Coming SoonUncle 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…
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Coming SoonThe 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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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)…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…