Professor
klarson@umich.eduOffice Information:
3263 Angell Hall
hours: M/W 4-5:30
Graduate Faculty; Novel and Narrative; English; Twentieth Century American; Nineteenth Century American; Romanticism American and British; American; Colonial and Early American; Poetry and Poetics
Education/Degree:
Ph.D., Johns Hopkins 1983Highlighted Work and Publications

Imagining Equality in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Kerry Larson
The theme of inequality has often dominated academic criticism, which has been concerned with identifying, analyzing, and demystifying various regimes of power and the illicit hierarchies upon which they are built. Studies of the United States in the nineteenth century have followed this trend in focusing on slavery, women’s writing, and working-class activism. Kerry Larson advocates the importance of looking instead at equality as a central theme, viewing it not as an endangered ideal to strive for and protect but as an imagined social reality in its own right, one with far-reaching consequences... See More
The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry
Edited by Kerry Larsen
This Companion is the first critical collection of its kind devoted solely to American poetry of the nineteenth century. It covers a wide variety of authors, many of whom are currently being rediscovered. A number of anthologies in the recent past have been devoted to the verse of groups such as Native Americans, African-Americans and women. This volume offers essays covering these groups as well as more familiar figures such as Dickinson, Whitman, Longfellow and Melville. The contents are divided between broad topics of concern such as the poetry of the Civil War or the development of the...
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