Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism - Brossura

Levine, Robert S.

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0807859036 ISBN 13: 9780807859032

Casa editrice: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008

Riassunto

American literary nationalism is traditionally understood as a cohesive literary tradition developed in the newly independent United States that emphasized the unique features of America and consciously differentiated American literature from British literature. Robert S. Levine challenges this assessment by exploring the conflicted, multiracial, and contingent dimensions present in the works of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American and African American writers. Conflict and uncertainty, not consensus, Levine argues, helped define American literary nationalism during this period.

Levine emphasizes the centrality of both inter- and intra-American conflict in his analysis of four illuminating "episodes" of literary responses to questions of U.S. racial nationalism and imperialism. He examines Charles Brockden Brown and the Louisiana Purchase; David Walker and the debates on the Missouri Compromise; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Hannah Crafts and the blood-based literary nationalism and expansionism of the mid-nineteenth century; and Frederick Douglass and his approximately forty-year interest in Haiti. Levine offers critiques of recent developments in whiteness and imperialism studies, arguing that a renewed attention to the place of contingency in American literary history helps us to better understand and learn from writers trying to make sense of their own historical moments.

Su questo libro

L'autore

Robert S. Levine is professor of English at the University of Maryland and author or editor of eleven books, including Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity and Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Dred (both from the University of North Carolina Press).

Product Description

Book by Levine Robert S

Su questa edizione

• Editore: The University of North Carolina Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0807859036
• ISBN 13: 9780807859032
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 334