The political novel, which enjoyed a steep yet short rise to international renown between the 1830s and the 1910s, is primarily concerned with the nation’s political future. It offers a characterization of the present, a blueprint of the future, and the image of the heroes needed to get there. With the standing it gained during its meteoric rise, the political novel helped elevate the novel altogether to become the leading literary genre of the twentieth century worldwide.

Focusing on its adaptation in the Chinese context, Catherine Vance Yeh traces the genre from Disraeli’s England through Europe and the United States to East Asia. Her study goes beyond comparative approaches and nation-state- and language-centered histories of literature to examine the intrinsic connections among literary works. Through detailed studies, especially of the Chinese exemplars, Yeh explores the tensions characteristic of transcultural processes: the dynamics through which a particular, and seemingly local, literary genre goes global; the ways in which such a globalized literary genre maintains its core features while assuming local identity and interacting with local audiences and political authorities; and the relationship between the politics of form and the role of politics in literary innovation.

Citizenship defines the U.S. political experiment, but the modern legal category that it now names is a relatively recent invention. There was no Constitutional definition of citizenship until the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, almost a century after the Declaration of Independence. Civic Longing looks at the fascinating prehistory of U.S. citizenship in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, when the cultural and juridical meaning of citizenship—as much as its scope—was still up for grabs. Carrie Hyde recovers the numerous cultural forms through which the meaning of citizenship was provisionally made and remade in the early United States.

Civic Longing offers the first historically grounded account of the formative political power of the imaginative traditions that shaped early debates about citizenship. In the absence of a centralized legal definition of citizenship, Hyde shows, politicians and writers regularly turned to a number of highly speculative traditions—political philosophy, Christian theology, natural law, fiction, and didactic literature—to authorize visions of what citizenship was or ought to be. These speculative traditions sustained an idealized image of citizenship by imagining it from its outer limits, from the point of view of its “negative civic exemplars”—expatriates, slaves, traitors, and alienated subjects.

By recovering the strange, idiosyncratic meanings of citizenship in the early United States, Hyde provides a powerful critique of originalism, and challenges anachronistic assumptions that read the definition of citizenship backward from its consolidation in the mid-nineteenth century as jus soli or birthright citizenship.

Latin American fiction won great acclaim in the United States during the 1960s, when many North American writers and critics felt that our national writing had reached a low ebb. In this study of experimental fiction from both Americas, Johnny Payne argues that the North American reception of the "boom" in Latin American fiction distorted the historical grounding of this writing, erroneously presenting it as mainly an exotic "magical realism." He offers new readings that detail the specific, historical relation between experimental fiction and various authors' careful, deliberate deformations and reformations of the political rhetoric of the modern state.

Payne juxtaposes writers from Argentina and Uruguay with North American authors, setting up suggestive parallels between the diverse but convergent practices of writers on both continents. He considers Nelson Marra in conjunction with Donald Barthelme and Gordon Lish; Teresa Porzecanski with Harry Mathews; Ricardo Piglia with John Barth; Silvia Schmid and Manuel Puig with Fanny Howe and Lydia Davis; and Jorge Luis Borges and Luisa Valenzuela with William Burroughs and Kathy Acker.

With this innovative, dual-continent approach, Conquest of the New Word will be of great interest to everyone working in Latin American literature, women's studies, translation studies, creative writing, and cultural theory.