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| "The first volume presents all the genre’s essential voices in generous selections. Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville are here, as is Rose Terry Cooke, a leading early voice of American literary regionalism, restored to her rightful place as a major writer with three indelible masterpieces. Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron-Mills,” a gripping work of social realism, appears in a version that restores passages cut from its original magazine publication to blunt the author’s scathing critique of Christian indifference to the poverty of industrial workers. Among the many rediscovered gems in this volume are William Austin’s “Peter Rugg, the Missing Man,” an unforgettable story about a cursed wanderer that has passed into New England folklore; two sketches from antebellum Black writer and physician James McCune Smith’s “Heads of the Colored People” series, which lampoon the racist pseudoscience of phrenology; Lucretia P. Hale’s feminist fantasy “The Queen of the Red Chessman”; Francis Parkman’s “The Scalp-Hunter, ” a riveting frontier drama drawn from the author’s wilderness travels in New England’s far north; and Fitz-James O’Brien’s “The Lost Room” and “What Was It?,” powerful and highly charged homoerotic tales of decadent horror" [Verlag] |
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