Introduction: What Is Method and Why Does
It Matter?
Part One: History and Literature in America
1 Domesticating Virtue: Coquettes and Revolutionaries in Young America
2 Vanishing Americans: Gender, Empire, and New Historicism
3 Seeing Sentiment: Photography, Race, and the Innocent Eye
4 The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Anita Hill
Part Two: Reading “Culture”
5 Mass Culture/Popular Culture: Notes for a Humanist’s Primer
6 Dancing for Eels at Catherine Market
7 AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signi?cation
8 The Occult of True Black Womanhood
Part Three: Nationalism Reconsidered
9 The Mass Public and the Mass Subject
10 Traditional Narrative: Contemporary Uses, Historical Perspectives
11 The Stakes of Textual Border-Crossing: Hualing Nieh’s Mulberry and Peach in Sinocentric, Asian American, and Feminist Critical Practices
12 Americanization: What Are We Talking About?