In the last decade, formalist and deconstructive approaches to literary studies have been attacked by critics for isolating texts as distinctive aesthetic or linguistic objects, separate from their social and historical contexts. Yet historicist and cultural approaches have often reduced texts to no more than superstructural effects of historical or ideological forces. Peter J. Bellis examines a number of nineteenth-century American writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, exploring the ways in which they engage with - rather than escape from or obscure - social and political issues.