Writing for Justice: Victor Séjour, the Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, and the Age of Transatlantic Emancipations

Mortara, Elèna

ISBN 10: 1611687896 ISBN 13: 9781611687897

Casa editrice: Dartmouth College, 2015

Riassunto

Winner of the European Association for American Studies Prize 2016. In Writing for Justice, Elena Mortara presents a richly layered study of the cultural and intellectual atmosphere of mid-nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, through close readings of the life and work of Victor Sejour, an expat American Creole from New Orleans living in Paris. In addition to writing The Mulatto, an early story on slavery in Saint-Domingue, Sejour penned La Tireuse de cartes (The Fortune-Teller, 1859), a popular play based on the famed Mortara case. In this historical incident, Pope Pius IX kidnapped Edgardo Mortara, the child of a Jewish family living in the Papal States. The details of the play's production - and its reception on both sides of the Atlantic - are intertwined with the events of the Italian Risorgimento and of pre - Civil War America. Writing for Justice is full of surprising encounters with French and American writers and historical figures, including Hugo, Hawthorne, Twain, Napoleon III, Garibaldi, and Lincoln. As Elena Mortara passionately argues, the enormous amount of public attention received by the case reveals an era of underappreciated transatlantic intellectual exchange, in which an African American writer used notions of emancipation in religious as well as racial terms, linking the plight of blacks in America to that of Jews in Europe, and to the larger battles for freedom and nationhood advancing across the continent. This book will appeal both to general readers and to scholars, including historians, literary critics, and specialists in African American studies, Jewish, Catholic, or religious studies, multilingual American literature, francophone literature, theatrical life, nineteenth-century European politics, and cross-cultural encounters.

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Recensione:

"While there are studies of the Edgardo Mortara case, a biography of Victor Sejour, and histories of the anti-slavery movements and of the battle for Jewish emancipation in Europe and the Americas, this outstanding book interweaves all these strands successfully into a freshly researched single work."--Werner Sollors, professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University

"A masterful examination of what must be one of the most intriguing figures of mid-nineteenth-century American literature, Writing for Justice reflects a refreshing transnational turn in literary study."--David I. Kertzer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Pope and Mussolini and The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara,

"A brilliant book . . . Elena Mortara has managed to enhance a haunted family history by devising a fascinating detective story as well." --Stephen Whitfield, Brandeis University

A most illuminating read. . . .Professor Mortara's more than a hundred pages of notes and bibliography, her coverage of contemporary newspapers in three languages (what she aptly calls the rough draft of history ) are a gift. All of this is also a fine contribution to the relatively new approach to American Studies multiethnic and multilingual (a debt to Werner Sollors pioneering work at Harvard), in its claim for Sejour and similar others who are or should be part of the American canon. Jules Chametzky, --"Massachusetts Review""

Sejour had a bent for crossing the boundaries between cultures: espousing the cause of the discriminated Jews . . . he was able to give a universal dimension to his commitment, in line with the movement of emancipation, against slavery and prejudice, which was then becoming prominent on both sides of the Atlantic. Antonio Carioti, --"Corriere della sera""

L'autore:

ELENA MORTARA is a professor of American literature at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. A well-known scholar of Jewish American writing and nineteenth-century literature, she has written, edited, and translated numerous books and articles."

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Dartmouth College
• Data di pubblicazione: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1611687896
• ISBN 13: 9781611687897
• Rilegatura: Rilegatura all'americana
• Numero di pagine: 330