Critical Reading

Louisa May Alcott

• Deese, Helen R. "Louisa May Alcott's" Moods": A New Archival Discovery." The New England Quarterly 76.3 (2003): 439-455.

Rebecca Harding Davis

• Lasseter, Janice  Milner. "The Censored and Uncensored  Literary Life of Life in the Iron Mills." Legacy, Vol. 20 (2003).
• Schocket, Eric. "“Discovering Some New Race”: Rebecca Harding Davis's “Life in the Iron Mills” and the Literary Emergence of Working-Class Whiteness." PMLA 115.1 (2000): 46-59.
• Miles, Caroline S. "Representing and self-mutilating the laboring male body: Re-examining Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills." American Transcendental Quarterly 18.2 (2004).
• Gatlin, Jill. "Disturbing Aesthetics: Industrial Pollution, Moral Discourse, and Narrative Form in Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills”." Nineteenth-Century Literature 68.2 (2013).
• Seitler, Dana. "Strange Beauty: The Politics of Ungenre in Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills." American Literature 86.3 (2014).

Frederick Douglass

• Gopnik, Adam. “The Prophetic Pragmatism of Frederick Douglass.” New Yorker, 8 Oct 2018.

Harriet Jacobs

• Hanrahan, Heidi M. "Harriet Jacobs's 'Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl:' A Retelling of Lydia Maria Child's 'The Quadroons.'" The New England Quarterly, Vol. 78, No. 4 (Dec., 2005).
• Andrews, William L. "Class and Class Awareness in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." From Auto/Biography across the Americas: Transnational Themes in Life Writing, ed. Ricia Anne Chansky (2017).
• Sommers, Samantha M. ""Harriet Jacob and the Recirculation of Print Culture." MELUS: Multiethnic Literature of the United States. Vol. 40, No. 3 (Fall 2015).
• Kanzler, Katja. "'To Tell the Kitchen Verison': Architectural Figurations of Race and Gender in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Harriet Wilson's Our Nig." Gender Forum 15 (2006). 
• Foreman, Gabrielle P. "The Politics of Sex and Representationin Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." This is a chapter in Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (2009), pp. 19-36.
• Rifkin, Mark. "A Home Made Sacred by Protecting Law': Black Activist Homemaking and Geographies of Citizenship in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." difference: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Vol. 18, no.2 (2007).

Herman Melville

• Bercaw Edwards, Mary K. and Wyn Kelley. "Melville and the Spoken Word." From The Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick, Third Edition, edited by Hershel Parker (2018).
• Adams, Elizabeth. "The Oath of the Pequod: Moby-Dick, Jacques-Louis David's Oaths of the Horatii, and the Aesthetic of the Distinct." Leviathan, Vol. 24, No. 1 (2022).

Henry David Thoreau

• Schulz, Kathryn. “The Moral Judgements of Henry DavidThoreau.” New Yorker, 19 Oct 2015.

Walt Whitman

• Vendler, Helen. “Poetry and the Mediation of Value: Whitman on Lincoln.” Michigan Quarterly Review (2000).
• Pollak, Vivian. "Poetic Value and Erotic Norms: A Response to Helen Vendler." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review (2001), Vol. 18, No. 3.
• Yongue, P. L., “Violence in Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"”, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review (1984) Vol.1, No. 4.
• Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. "Whitman's 'Lilacs' and the Grammars of Time." PMLA/Publictaions of the Modern Language Association of America (1982).
• Parkinson, Thomas. "When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd" and the American Civil Religion." The Southern Review;  Vol. 19, No. 1, (1983).