Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism from the Revolution to World War II by John Carlos Rowe

In this book John Carlos Rowe investigates a variety of American cultural texts, from Charles Brockden Brown to Zora Neale Hurston, to examine the relationship between US imperial projects (both at home and abroad) and the literary work of these texts. Although this book is fairly wide-ranging, Rowe does a sophisticated job of categorizing each author's relationship to imperialism, always demonstrating that America's imperial history is closer than we usually remember and also more continuous (our colonization of the Other within our borders is related to our imperialist gestures beyond our political bounds). I think that he dismisses Brockden Brown's and Poe's use of the Gothic as a formal element (and one that obstructs our ability to read the texts as imperialist) too quickly.