Xenocitizens : illiberal ontologies in nineteenth-century America / Jason Berger.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Berger, Jason, 1976- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

American literature.

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

Politics and literature.

Liberalism in literature.

Social change in literature.

Liberalism--United States--History--19th century.

Liberalism.

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

Literature and society.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (289 pages)

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, [2020]

Summary:

In Xenocitizens, Jason Berger returns to the antebellum United States in order to challenge a scholarly tradition based on liberal–humanist perspectives. Through the concept of the xenocitizen, a synthesis of the terms “xeno,” which connotes alien or stranger, and “citizen,” which signals a naturalized subject of a state, Berger uncovers realities and possibilities that have been foreclosed by dominant paradigms. Innovatively re-orienting our thinking about traditional nineteenth-century figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau as well as formative writers such as William Wells Brown, Martin R. Delany, Margaret Fuller, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Xenocitizens glimpses how antebellum thinkers formulated, in response to varying forms of oppression and crisis, startlingly unique ontological and social models as well as unfamiliar ways to exist and to leverage change. In doing so, Berger offers us a different nineteenth century—pushing our imaginative and critical thinking toward new terrain.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Introduction: Xenocitizens

1. Emerson’s Operative Mood

2. Agitating Margaret Fuller

3. Thoreau’s Militant Vegetables

4. Unadjusted Emancipations

Epilogue: Care, There and Now

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0-8232-8777-7

OCLC:

1158219037