Christine Holbo is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University. She 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 current book project examines the way the challenges of social knowledge and social sympathy defined American literary realism as a self-conscious literary movement in post-Reconstruction America.