This broad-ranging study reconfigures US literature as a product of hemispheric relations. Hemispheric Regionalism: Romance and the Geography of Genre brings together a rich archive of popular culture, fugitive slave narratives, advertisements, political treatises, and literature to construct a new literary history from a hemispheric and regional perspective. At the center of this history is romance, a popular and versatile literary genre uniquely capable of translating the threat posed by the Haitian Revolution—or the expansionist possibilities of Cuban annexation—for a rapidly increasing rea ... More

This broad-ranging study reconfigures US literature as a product of hemispheric relations. Hemispheric Regionalism: Romance and the Geography of Genre brings together a rich archive of popular culture, fugitive slave narratives, advertisements, political treatises, and literature to construct a new literary history from a hemispheric and regional perspective. At the center of this history is romance, a popular and versatile literary genre uniquely capable of translating the threat posed by the Haitian Revolution—or the expansionist possibilities of Cuban annexation—for a rapidly increasing readership. Through romance, it traces imaginary and real circuits of exchange and remaps romance’s position in nineteenth-century life and letters as neither irreducible to nor fully mediated by a concept of nation. The energies associated with Cuba and Haiti, manifest destiny and apocalypse, bring historical depth to an otherwise short national history. As a result, romance becomes remarkably influential in inculcating a sense of New World citizenry. The study shifts our critical focus from novel and nation to romance and region, which is inevitable when the tangled, messy relations across geographic and historical boundaries are considered.