Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction

Hannah Lauren Murray is Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Liverpool. Her research centres on race and citizenship in nineteenth-century American literature, with a specific focus on speculative genres. She has previously published in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (2020), The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown (Oxford UP, 2019) and the Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies (2017) and she sits on the steering committee for the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (BrANCA).

• Acknowledgements A Note on Language Introduction: Inexplicable Voices: Liminal Whiteness in the Early United States 1. ‘A shriek so terrible!’: Charles Brockden Brown’s Sensational Ventriloquists 2. ‘This is a story-telling age’: Spectral Nostalgia in Washington Irving’s Bracebridge Hall 3. ‘What had become of me?’: Sheppard Lee’s Blackface Transformation 4. ‘I say to you that I am dead!’: Edgar Allan Poe's Protesting Cadavers 5. ‘How can I speak to thee?’: Herman Melville’s Muted Voice 6. ‘I’m making a white man of him’: Making and Breaking Whiteness in The Garies and their Friends Coda: The Resurrection of Whiteness BibliographyIndex

In a quick coda, Murry powerfully connects the dots to the United States today, showing how fears of white marginality continue fueling the powerfully exclusionary logics of whiteness. This is a book that is generous to its predecessors across an array of fields, and that gives new liveliness and relevance to familiar debates about the destructive innovation of white citizenship in the newly United States.