Strange nation : literary nationalism and cultural conflict in the age of Poe / J. Gerald Kennedy.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kennedy, J. Gerald, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--19th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

National characteristics, American, in literature.

Nationalism in literature.

Social conflict in literature.

Nationalism and literature--United States--History--19th century.

Nationalism and literature.

Literature and society--United States--History--19th century.

Literature and society.

History.

United States.

United States--In literature.

Physical Description:

xiii, 457 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Other Title:

Literary nationalism and cultural conflict in the age of Poe

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2016]

Summary:

" After the War of 1812, Americans belatedly realized that they lacked national identity. The subsequent campaign to articulate nationality transformed every facet of culture from architecture to painting, and in the realm of letters, literary jingoism embroiled American authors in the heated politics of nationalism. The age demanded stirring images of U.S. virtue, often achieved by contriving myths and obscuring brutalities. Between these sanitized narratives of the nation and U.S. social reality lay a grotesque discontinuity: vehement conflicts over slavery, Indian removal, immigration, and territorial expansion divided the country. Authors such as Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine M. Sedgwick, William Gilmore Simms, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Lydia Maria Child wrestled uneasily with the imperative to revise history to produce national fable. Counter-narratives by fugitive slaves, Native Americans, and defiant women subverted literary nationalism by exposing the plight of the unfree and dispossessed. And with them all, Edgar Allan Poe openly mocked literary nationalism and deplored the celebration of "stupid" books appealing to provincial self-congratulation. More than any other author, he personifies the contrary, alien perspective that discerns the weird operations at work behind the facade of American nation-building. "-- Provided by publisher.

"Examining work by William Wells Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Caroline Kirkland, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and others, Strange Nation investigates America's often vexed relationship with the practice of literary nationalism"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note:

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Strangeness of American Nationhood

Chapter 1: Refiguring the Foreign: Irving, Poe, and America's "Europe"

Chapter 2: Writing Against the Nation: Cooper's Gleanings

Chapter 3: Patriotic Anti-Nationalism: Minority Reports from Abroad

Chapter 4: Cleansing Actions: Rewriting the Border Wars

Chapter 5: Removal and Remorse in Jacksonian America

Chapter 6: National Awakening: Reconstructing the Revolution

Chapter 7: America Against Itself: The South, Slavery, and Dissociative National Identities

Chapter 8: The Cartography of Destiny and the Savage West

Chapter 9: The Interpreter of National Maladies: Poe's American Turn

Bibliography.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780195393682

0195393686

9780195393699

0195393694

OCLC:

927363760