UNM’s Alemán Pens Anthology

Jesse Alemán, associate professor of English at the University of New Mexico, recently co-edited, “Empire and the Literature of Sensation: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction,” with Rutgers University Press, 2007. “Empire” is an anthology of five 19th-century sensational novels about the United State’s imperial encounters in Texas, Mexico and Cuba during the era normally associated with American romanticism, 1830s-1860s.

The popular novels, republished for the first time, capture the excitement, anxiety and ambivalence about the U.S.’s emerging empire through sensational plotlines featuring cross-dressed escapades, captivity stories, interracial romances and gothic adventures set exotic locales – Texas, Mexico and Cuba – that tantalized Manifest Destiny's expansionist appetite.

The book also includes a critical introduction, chronology and endnotes.

“Empire demonstrates that the culture of U.S. imperialism began much earlier than the late 19th century and found explicit but ambivalent expression in the popular, low-brow literature published during the American renaissance,” Alemán said.

The anthology is co-edited with Shelley Streeby, associate professor of literature at University of California, San Diego.

Media Contact: Carolyn Gonzales, (505) 277-5920; e-mail: cgonzal@unm.edu