Publications
Christine Gerhardt. The American Novel of the Nineteenth Century. Edited with an Introduction. Handbooks of English and American Studies. Berlin and New York: DeGruyter, 2017.
This handbook offers students and researchers a compact introduction to nineteenth-century American novels in the light of current critical debates. Part I provides an overview of key historical and critical frameworks, including slavery, transnationalism, environmentalism and print culture, sentimentalism, the gothic, realism and naturalism. Part II discusses 25 core American novels in an innovative combination of 1) succinct surveys of biographical and cultural contexts, 2) fresh close readings, and 3) detailed discussions of relevant literary and cultural theories.
Christine Gerhardt and Christa Grewe-Volpp (Eds.). Environmental Imagination on the Move: Nature and Mobility in American Literature and Culture. Special Issue of American Studies/Amerikastudien 61.4 (2016).
This special issue of American Studies/Amerikastudien offers six innovative analyses that investigate the multifaceted connections between ecologically relevant perspectives and historically and culturally specific kinds of geographical movement and mobility in American literature and culture. It links ecocritical debates about environmental racism, ecofeminist ethics, urban ecologies, posthumanism, capitalism and globalization to debates about movement and mobility that take place in fields such as migration studies, diaspora studies, and mobility studies.