Strange nation [electronic resource] : literary nationalism and cultural conflict in the age of Poe / J. Gerald Kennedy.
2016
PS217.N38 K46 2016eb
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Title
Strange nation [electronic resource] : literary nationalism and cultural conflict in the age of Poe / J. Gerald Kennedy.
Author
Kennedy, J. Gerald, author.
ISBN
9780190490621 (electronic book)
Published
New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2016.
Language
English
Description
1 online resource (xiii, 457 pages) : illustrations
Other Standard Identifiers
10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195393682 doi
Call Number
PS217.N38 K46 2016eb
Dewey Decimal Classification
810.9358
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.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
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Access limited to authorized users.
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Description based on print version record.
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Strange nation.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: The Strangeness of American Nationhood
Refiguring the Foreign: Irving, Poe, and America's "Europe"
Writing Against the Nation: Cooper's Gleanings
Patriotic Anti-Nationalism: Minority Reports from Abroad
Cleansing Actions: Rewriting the Border Wars
Removal and Remorse in Jacksonian America
National Awakening: Reconstructing the Revolution
America Against Itself: The South, Slavery, and Dissociative National Identities
The Cartography of Destiny and the Savage West
The Interpreter of National Maladies: Poe's American Turn.
Refiguring the Foreign: Irving, Poe, and America's "Europe"
Writing Against the Nation: Cooper's Gleanings
Patriotic Anti-Nationalism: Minority Reports from Abroad
Cleansing Actions: Rewriting the Border Wars
Removal and Remorse in Jacksonian America
National Awakening: Reconstructing the Revolution
America Against Itself: The South, Slavery, and Dissociative National Identities
The Cartography of Destiny and the Savage West
The Interpreter of National Maladies: Poe's American Turn.