“Intense, often brilliant.”

Frederick Newberry | The Journal of English and Germanic Philology

“In her brilliant feminist study, Berlant examines Nathaniel Hawthorne’s work . . . on political, popular, sexual, and textual levels. She traces Hawthorne’s thought about the complexities of citizenship, and, focusing on their feminist implications, she joins the current move to ‘historicize and theorize female political agency in the democratic social spaces of American culture.’”

Lucy M. Friebert | Signs

“A stunning investigation into the discursive practices that reconstitute the local resident as a citizen of an abstract memory called ‘America.’”

Russ Castronovo | American Literature