Is there a field of literary studies in which literary scholars focus on texts that are so frequently distant from what the layperson would recognize as “literature” as in the study of early America? Even decades after Renaissance Self-Fashioning made an academic star of Stephen Greenblatt, I would argue not. Likewise, is there a literary field in which, as a result, close attention to text demands a greater familiarity with (purportedly) empirical methods of historical study? Same answer. Such are the disciplinary conditions, then, under which Situation Critical: Critique, Theory, and Early American Studies, edited by literary scholar Max Cavitch Read more