19th century American literature and cultural theory

John Evelev is a scholar of mid-nineteenth century U.S literature, and in the broadest sense his work has focused on how the writings of that period have shaped modern American social and environmental ideas. His first book – Tolerable Entertainment: Herman Melville and Professionalism in Antebellum New York  (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006) – located the work of Herman Melville in the context of a new American class landscape emerging in the nation’s first modern metropolis, New York, and explored how Melville’s fiction helped first to articulate and later to critique a new professional middle-class ideology. His second scholarly monograph, Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1872 (Oxford University Press, 2021) recovers the central role that the picturesque, a popular mode of scenery appreciation that advocated for an improved and manipulated natural landscape, played in the social, spatial, and literary history of mid-nineteenth century America. It argues that the picturesque was not simply a landscape aesthetic, but also a way of seeing and imaginatively shaping nature that was widely embraced by bourgeois Americans to transform their national landscape in their own image. His next project returns to the subject of the literary life of antebellum New York to focus on the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Parker Willis to articulate a radically different vision of our notion of literary professionalism in the time.