Immigration, Ethnicity, and Class in American Writing, 1830–1860

Reading the Stranger

Inbunden, Engelska, 2013

Av Leonardo Buonomo

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This book examines the close relationship between the portrayal of foreigners and the delineation of culture and identity in antebellum American writing. Both literary and historical in its approach, this study shows how, in a period marked by extensive immigration, heated debates on national and racial traits, during a flowering in American letters, encouraged responses from American authors to outsiders that not only contain precious insights into nineteenth-century America’s self-construction but also serve to illuminate our own time’s multicultural societies. The authors under consideration are alternately canonical (Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville), recently rediscovered (Kirkland), or simply neglected (Arthur). The texts analyzed cover such different genres as diaries, letters, newspapers, manuals, novels, stories, and poems.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2013-12-04
Mått161 x 239 x 22 mm
Vikt508 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor212
FörlagAssociated University Presses
ISBN9781611476521

Tillhör följande kategorier

Litteraturvetenskap inom Skonlitteratur
Litteraturvetenskap inom Skonlitteratur
Sociala grupper och identitet inom Samhalle och politik
Etnicitet inom Samhalle och politik
Migration inom Samhalle och politik

AcknowledgmentsPrologue: Eyes on the StrangerIntroduction1. Face to Face with the Stranger1.1. Ralph Waldo Emerson on National Identity1.2. Herman Melville’s Redburn: In the Company of Strangers1.3. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Foreign Reflections2. The Domestic Other2.1. James Fenimore Cooper: Defining Master and Servant2.2. Walt Whitman: A Sympathetic Glance at “Bridget”3. Landscape with Strangers3.1. Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Changing Face of America3.2. Henry David Thoreau and His Foreign Neighbors4. Views from the CityEpilogueBibliographyIndex

Buonomo sheds new light on canonical and lesser-known writers. . . .Buonomo’s rigorously documented archival work is enlightening and inspiring, and the strength of his argument, coupled with his refusal to simplify or to dismiss the myriad ambiguities and complexities of the topic at hand, make the book a precious contribution to the scholarship on 19th-century American literature and culture, and on both Ethnic Studies and Whiteness Studies. . . .In this volume, Leonardo Buonomo has not only convincingly put the foreigner at center stage . . . but he has claimed a fundamental position for it at the heart of the national identity formation. In doing so, his work acquires an important currency in today’s cultural and political landscape, as it mirrors and evokes contemporary debates on migration, on the relationship between multiculturalism and national identities, on racism and class struggle, and on seemingly unbridgeable cultural gaps between contiguous communities.