Christine Holbo studies American literature from the age of sentiment to the modernist era. Her work explores how the social valences of literature intersect with the constraints of genre, approaching the transformation of the novel in terms of competing forms of social knowledge and artistic expression. Her first book, Legal Realisms: the American Novel under Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2019) considers the way the challenges of social knowledge and social sympathy defined American literary realism as a self-conscious literary movement in post-Reconstruction America.