Robert S. Levine
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807832264
- eISBN:
- 9781469605654
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807887882_levine
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
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 ...
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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. This book 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, it argues, helped define American literary nationalism during this period. The book emphasizes the centrality of both inter- and intra-American conflict in its analysis of four illuminating “episodes” of literary responses to questions of U.S. racial nationalism and imperialism. It 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. The book 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.Less
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. This book 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, it argues, helped define American literary nationalism during this period. The book emphasizes the centrality of both inter- and intra-American conflict in its analysis of four illuminating “episodes” of literary responses to questions of U.S. racial nationalism and imperialism. It 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. The book 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.
Robert S. Levine
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807832264
- eISBN:
- 9781469605654
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807887882_levine.4
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This book is about literary practice in a historical mode. It does not set forth a new theory of American literary nationalism; it does not “locate” race and nation or offer any other ...
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This book is about literary practice in a historical mode. It does not set forth a new theory of American literary nationalism; it does not “locate” race and nation or offer any other all-encompassing explanatory paradigm; it does not argue for unbroken connections between the works and periods that are examined in its four main chapters or “episodes.” The book attempts to complicate our understanding of American literary nationalism by emphasizing the conflicted, multiracial, and contingent dimensions of its various articulations. In addition, it attempts to understand selected works in relation to debates of their contemporary moment in ways that can help to complicate thinking about race and nation in our own moment.Less
This book is about literary practice in a historical mode. It does not set forth a new theory of American literary nationalism; it does not “locate” race and nation or offer any other all-encompassing explanatory paradigm; it does not argue for unbroken connections between the works and periods that are examined in its four main chapters or “episodes.” The book attempts to complicate our understanding of American literary nationalism by emphasizing the conflicted, multiracial, and contingent dimensions of its various articulations. In addition, it attempts to understand selected works in relation to debates of their contemporary moment in ways that can help to complicate thinking about race and nation in our own moment.
