The Construction and Contestation of American Cultures and Identities in the Early National Period
Author: Udo J. Hebel
Publisher: Universitatsverlag Winter
Published: 1999
Total Pages: 492
ISBN-13:
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The Genesis of America
Author: Jasper M. Trautsch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2018-09-13
Total Pages: 329
ISBN-13: 110842824X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKExplores how foreign policy was used to promote American nationalism by creating external threats in the early republic.
The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown
Author: Philip Barnard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-05-15
Total Pages: 609
ISBN-13: 0190942266
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOver the past few decades, the writings of Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) have reclaimed a place of prominence in the American literary canon. Yet despite the explosion of teaching, research, and an ever-increasing number of doctoral dissertations, there remains no up-to-date overview of Brown's work. The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown provides a state-of-the-art survey of the life and writings of Charles Brockden Brown, a key writer of the Atlantic revolutionary age and U.S. Early Republic. The seven novels he published during his lifetime are now studied for their narrative complexity, innovations in genre, and social-political commentaries on life in early America and the revolutionary Atlantic. Through the late twentieth century, Brown was best known as an author of political romances in the gothic mode that proved to be widely influential in romantic era, and has generated large amounts of scholarship as a crucial figure in the history of the American novel. This Handbook extends its focus beyond the well-known novels to address the full range of Brown's prolific literary career. The Handbook includes original essays on all of Brown's fiction and nonfiction writings, and offers new interpretations of the contexts of his work: from the literary, social, political, and economic to the scientific, commercial, and religious. The thirty-five contributors in this volume speak in new ways about Brown's depictions of literary theory, social justice, sexuality, and property relations, as well as colonialism, slavery, Native Americans, and women's rights. Brown's perspectives on American and global history, emerging modernity, selfhood and otherness, and other topics, are explained in comprehensible and up-to-date terms. In addition to opening up new avenues of research, The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown provides the intellectual foundations needed to understand Brown's enduring impact and literary legacy.
Republic of Intellect
Author: Bryan Waterman
Publisher: JHU Press
Published: 2007-05-15
Total Pages: 354
ISBN-13: 1421403897
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the 1790s, a single conversational circle—the Friendly Club—united New York City's most ambitious young writers, and in Republic of Intellect, Bryan Waterman uses an innovative blend of literary criticism and historical narrative to re-create the club's intellectual culture. The story of the Friendly Club reveals the mutually informing conditions of authorship, literary association, print culture, and production of knowledge in a specific time and place—the tumultuous, tenuous world of post-revolutionary New York City. More than any similar group in the early American republic, the Friendly Club occupied a crossroads—geographical, professional, and otherwise—of American literary and intellectual culture. Waterman argues that the relationships among club members' novels, plays, poetry, diaries, legal writing, and medical essays lead to important first examples of a distinctively American literature and also illuminate the local, national, and transatlantic circuits of influence and information that club members called "the republic of intellect." He addresses topics ranging from political conspiracy in the gothic novels of Charles Brockden Brown to the opening of William Dunlap's Park Theatre, from early American debates on gendered conversation to the publication of the first American medical journal. Voluntary association and print culture helped these young New Yorkers, Waterman concludes, to produce a broader and more diverse post-revolutionary public sphere than scholars have yet recognized.
Urban Enlightenment and the Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essay
Author: R. Squibbs
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2014-01-20
Total Pages: 197
ISBN-13: 1137378247
DOWNLOAD EBOOKUrban Enlightenment offers the first literary history of the British periodical essay spanning the entire eighteenth century, and the first to study the genre's development and cultural impact in a transatlantic context.
Celebrating Ethnicity and Nation
Author: Jürgen Heideking
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2001
Total Pages: 324
ISBN-13: 9781571812438
DOWNLOAD EBOOKArising out of the context of the re-configuration of Europe, new perspectives are applied by the authors of this volume to the process of nation-building in the United States. By focusing on a variety of public celebrations and festivities from the Revolution to the early twentieth century, the formative period of American national identity, the authors reveal the complex interrelationships between collective identities on the local, regional, and national level which, over time, shaped the peculiar character of American nationalism. This volume combines vivid descriptions of various public celebrations with a sophisticated methodological and theoretical approach.
Slavery, Colonialism and Connoisseurship
Author: Nandini Bhattacharya
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-11-28
Total Pages: 328
ISBN-13: 135114894X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKColonization, slavery, traffic in women, and connoisseurship seem to have particularly captured the imaginations of circumatlantic writers of the later eighteenth century. In this book, Nandini Bhattacharya examines the works of such writers as Richard Brinsley Sheridan, George Colman Jr., James Cobb and Phillis Wheatley, who redefined ideas about Value and Taste. Writers re-presented the ethical debate on Value and trade through aesthetic metaphors and discourse, thus disguising the distasteful nature of the ownership and exchange of human beings and mitigating the guilt associated with that traffic. Bhattacharya explores the circumatlantic redefinition of Taste and Value as cultural and moral concepts in gender and racial discourses in slave-owning, colonizing, and connoisseurial Britain, and demonstrates how Value and aesthetics were redefined in late eighteenth-century circumatlantic discourses with particular focus on the language of slavery, trade and connoisseurship. She also delineates the workings of transnational consciousness and experience of race, class, gender, slavery, colonialism and connoisseurship in the late eighteenth-century circumatlantic rim. Throughout the study, Bhattacharya rereads late eighteenth-century British literature as a stage for the articulation of theories of difference and domination.
American Literature in Transition, 1770–1828
Author: William Huntting Howell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2022-06-23
Total Pages: 672
ISBN-13: 1108617042
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis volume presents a complex portrait of the United States of America grappling with the trials of national adolescence. Topics include (but are not limited to): the dynamics of language and power, the treachery of memory, the lived experience of racial and economic inequality, the aesthetics of Indigeneity, the radical possibilities of disability, the fluidity of gender and sexuality, the depth and culture-making power of literary genre, the history of poetics, the cult of performance, and the hidden costs of foodways. Taken together, the essays offer a vision of a vibrant, contradictory, and conflicted early US Republic resistant to consensus accountings and poised to inform new and better origin stories for the polity to come.
Washington Irving’s Critique of American Culture
Author: J. Woodrow McCree
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2021-06-24
Total Pages: 199
ISBN-13: 179361962X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWashington Irving’s Critique of American Culture: Sketching a Vision of World Citizenship challenges long-standing views of Washington Irving. He has been portrayed as writing in the 18th century style of Addison and Goldsmith, without having much substance of his own. Irving has also been accused of being insufficiently American and adrift in an identity crisis. The author argues that Irving addressed the American cultural context very extensively—he was a writer of substance who articulated an ethic of world citizenship that was found in the philosophy of ancient Greek cynics and stoics. This ethic was united with a love of picturesque travel, which emphasized variety and texture in experience, resulting in an extraordinary affirmation of the value of cultural diversity in the new Republic. Irving was, in fact, a liminal figure straddling Romantic and neoclassical modes of writing and acting. The author draws attention to Irving’s success as a writer in the pictorial mode. Irving also expressed a critique of cultural loss and environmental destruction like that articulated by the artist Thomas Cole. The work embraces an interdisciplinary approach, where insights from philosophy, religion, art history, and social history shed light on an underestimated writer.
Strange Nation
Author: J. Gerald Kennedy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-03-21
Total Pages: 472
ISBN-13: 0190491280
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAfter 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.
