Iulian Cănănău, Fulbright alumnus at Lousiana State University (2007-2008), currently Senior Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Gävle (Sweden) and formerly Assistant Professor at the University of Bucharest, has published an outstanding study that traces the history of the concept of “Americanness” as a highly complex version of identity discourse in the 19th century. In Iulian Cănănău’s book, titled Constituting Americanness. A History of the Concept and Its Representations in Antebellum American Literature (published in 2015 by Peter Lang), carefully outlined methodological considerations frame the investigation of key representations of Americanness in foundational texts by R. W. Emerson, D. H. Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller and Harriet Jacobs, among others. The book cover aptly states that “following Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte, the author proposes that Americanness was not an ordinary word, but a concept with a historically specific semantic field. In the three decades before the Civil War, Americanness was constituted at the intersection of several concepts, in different stages of their respective histories: among these, nation, representation, individualism, sympathy, race, and womanhood”. Iulian Cănănău’s exquisite close reading of both fiction and nonfiction is complemented by his exploration of the larger political, economic, and social issues of the first half of the 19th century, making his book a must-read for students and researchers in American Studies all over the world.