Introduction: What Is Method and Why DoesIt Matter?Part One: History and Literature in America 1 Domesticating Virtue: Coquettes and Revolutionaries in Young America2 Vanishing Americans: Gender, Empire, and New Historicism3 Seeing Sentiment: Photography, Race, and the Innocent Eye4 The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Anita Hill Part Two: Reading "Culture" 5 Mass Culture/Popular Culture: Notes for a Humanist's Primer6 Dancing for Eels at Catherine Market 7 AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signi?cation8 The Occult of True Black Womanhood Part Three: Nationalism Reconsidered9 The Mass Public and the Mass Subject10 Traditional Narrative: Contemporary Uses, Historical Perspectives 11 The Stakes of Textual Border-Crossing: Hualing Nieh's Mulberry and Peach in Sinocentric, Asian American, and Feminist Critical Practices12 Americanization: What Are We Talking About?