Writing and Postcolonialism in the Early Republic

Writing and Postcolonialism in the Early Republic PDF Author: Edward Watts
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813917610
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Writing and Postcolonialism in the Early Republic is the first book-length analysis of early American literature through the lens of postcolonial theory. Although the United States represented a colonizing presence that displaced indigenous peoples and exported imperial culture, American colonists also found themselves exiled, often exploited and abused by the distant metropolitan center. In this innovative book, Edward Watts demonstrates how American post-Revolutionary literature exhibits characteristics of a post-colonial society.

Writing and Postcolonialism in the Early Republic

Writing and Postcolonialism in the Early Republic PDF Author: Edward Watts
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813917610
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Writing and Postcolonialism in the Early Republic is the first book-length analysis of early American literature through the lens of postcolonial theory. Although the United States represented a colonizing presence that displaced indigenous peoples and exported imperial culture, American colonists also found themselves exiled, often exploited and abused by the distant metropolitan center. In this innovative book, Edward Watts demonstrates how American post-Revolutionary literature exhibits characteristics of a post-colonial society.

Unbecoming British

Unbecoming British PDF Author: Kariann Akemi Yokota
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199779910
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
What can homespun cloth, stuffed birds, quince jelly, and ginseng reveal about the formation of early American national identity? In this wide-ranging and bold new interpretation of American history and its Founding Fathers, Kariann Akemi Yokota shows that political independence from Britain fueled anxieties among the Americans about their cultural inferiority and continuing dependence on the mother country. Caught between their desire to emulate the mother country and an awareness that they lived an ocean away on the periphery of the known world, they went to great lengths to convince themselves and others of their refinement. Taking a transnational approach to American history, Yokota examines a wealth of evidence from geography, the decorative arts, intellectual history, science, and technology to underscore that the process of "unbecoming British" was not an easy one. Indeed, the new nation struggled to define itself economically, politically, and culturally in what could be called America's postcolonial period. Out of this confusion of hope and exploitation, insecurity and vision, a uniquely American identity emerged.

Charles Brockden Brown and the Literary Magazine

Charles Brockden Brown and the Literary Magazine PDF Author: Michael Cody
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 9780786417841
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
From 1803 to 1807, Charles Brockden Brown served as editor and chief contributor to the Literary Magazine, and American Register, a popular Philadelphia miscellany. His position allowed him to observe and comment upon life in the United States and transatlantic world during the nineteenth century's first decade. This book considers how Brown's Literary Magazine contributed to the development of cultural cohesiveness and political stability in the young United States. It explores the intellectual and cultural setting in which this Philadelphia miscellany was published, the political writing that appears in what Brown claimed was a politically neutral venue, and the social and cultural criticism that attempts to guide the development of the American character. During his twenty years as an author, he participated in disseminating texts of cultural and literary worth. Brown's essays and reviews assisted in the establishment of reading habits in America and influenced the public reception of the early American press.

Messy Beginnings

Messy Beginnings PDF Author: Malini Johar Schueller
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813532332
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
When exploring the links between America and post-colonialism, scholars tend to think either in terms of contemporary multiculturalism, or of imperialism since 1898. This book challenges the idea of early America's immunity from issues of imperialism.

Globalizing American Studies

Globalizing American Studies PDF Author: Brian T. Edwards
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226185087
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
The discipline of American studies was established in the early days of World War II and drew on the myth of American exceptionalism. Now that the so-called American Century has come to an end, what would a truly globalized version of American studies look like? Brian T. Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar offer a new standard for the field’s transnational aspiration with Globalizing American Studies. The essays here offer a comparative, multilingual, or multisited approach to ideas and representations of America. The contributors explore unexpected perspectives on the international circulation of American culture: the traffic of American movies within the British Empire, the reception of the film Gone with the Wind in the Arab world, the parallels between Japanese and American styles of nativism, and new incarnations of American studies itself in the Middle East and South Asia. The essays elicit a forgotten multilateralism long inherent in American history and provide vivid accounts of post–Revolutionary science communities, late-nineteenth century Mexican border crossings, African American internationalism, Cold War womanhood in the United States and Soviet Russia, and the neo-Orientalism of the new obsession with Iran, among others. Bringing together established scholars already associated with the global turn in American studies with contributors who specialize in African studies, East Asian studies, Latin American studies, media studies, anthropology, and other areas, Globalizing American Studies is an original response to an important disciplinary shift in academia.

The American Idea of England, 1776-1840

The American Idea of England, 1776-1840 PDF Author: Jennifer Clark
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131704522X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Arguing that American colonists who declared their independence in 1776 remained tied to England by both habit and inclination, Jennifer Clark traces the new Americans' struggle to come to terms with their loss of identity as British, and particularly English, citizens. Americans' attempts to negotiate the new Anglo-American relationship are revealed in letters, newspaper accounts, travel reports, essays, song lyrics, short stories and novels, which Clark suggests show them repositioning themselves in a transatlantic context newly defined by political revolution. Chapters examine political writing as a means for Americans to explore the Anglo-American relationship, the appropriation of John Bull by American writers, the challenge the War of 1812 posed to the reconstructed Anglo-American relationship, the Paper War between American and English authors that began around the time of the War of 1812, accounts by Americans lured to England as a place of poetry, story and history, and the work of American writers who dissected the Anglo-American relationship in their fiction. Carefully contextualised historically, Clark's persuasive study shows that any attempt to examine what it meant to be American in the New Nation, and immediately beyond, must be situated within the context of the Anglo-American relationship.

American Enchantment

American Enchantment PDF Author: Michelle Sizemore
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190627530
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
American Enchantment' presents a new understanding of the social order after the American Revolution, one that enacts the concept of "enchantment" as a unique way of describing and coalescing popular power and social affiliation.

Imaginary Empires

Imaginary Empires PDF Author: Maria O'Malley
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807179264
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
In Imaginary Empires, Maria O’Malley examines early American texts published between 1767 and 1867 whose narratives represent women’s engagement in the formation of empire. Her analysis unearths a variety of responses to contact, exchange, and cohabitation in the early United States, stressing the possibilities inherent in the literary to foster participation, resignification, and rapprochement. New readings of The Female American, Leonora Sansay’s Secret History, Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, Lydia Maria Child’s A Romance of the Republic, and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl confound the metaphors of ghosts, haunting, and amnesia that proliferate in many recent studies of early US literary history. Instead, as O’Malley shows, these writings foreground acts of foundational violence involved in the militarization of domestic spaces, the legal impediments to the transfer of property and wealth, and the geopolitical standing of the United States. Racialized and gendered figures in the texts refuse to die, leave, or stay silent. In imagining different kinds of futures, these writers reckon with the ambivalent role of women in empire-building as they negotiate between their own subordinate position in society and their exertion of sovereignty over others. By tracing a thread of virtual history found in works by women, Imaginary Empires explores how reflections of the past offer a means of shaping future sociopolitical formations.

Founded in Fiction

Founded in Fiction PDF Author: Thomas Koenigs
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691188947
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
"This monograph presents a new history of early American literature that traces the diverse forms of fiction circulating in the early United States (1789-1861) and how they shaped the way Americans thought and argued about political and cultural issues of their age"--

The Importance of Feeling English

The Importance of Feeling English PDF Author: Leonard Tennenhouse
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400827922
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
American literature is typically seen as something that inspired its own conception and that sprang into being as a cultural offshoot of America's desire for national identity. But what of the vast precedent established by English literature, which was a major American import between 1750 and 1850? In The Importance of Feeling English, Leonard Tennenhouse revisits the landscape of early American literature and radically revises its features. Using the concept of transatlantic circulation, he shows how some of the first American authors--from poets such as Timothy Dwight and Philip Freneau to novelists like William Hill Brown and Charles Brockden Brown--applied their newfound perspective to pre-existing British literary models. These American "re-writings" would in turn inspire native British authors such as Jane Austen and Horace Walpole to reconsider their own ideas of subject, household, and nation. The enduring nature of these literary exchanges dramatically recasts early American literature as a literature of diaspora, Tennenhouse argues--and what made the settlers' writings distinctly and indelibly American was precisely their insistence on reproducing Englishness, on making English identity portable and adaptable. Written in an incisive and illuminating style, The Importance of Feeling English reveals the complex roots of American literature, and shows how its transatlantic movement aided and abetted the modernization of Anglophone culture at large.