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The Literary Quest for an American National Character
The sections of this volume are entitled: 'A Farmer Asks a Question and a Scientist Creates a Model', 'Hugh Henry Brackenridge and the Dogma of Balance', 'The Defining Moment: Washington Irving and a History of New York', 'The Fragments: Minor Writers (c1810-1824)', and 'The Illusion Ascendant'.
The Literary Quest for an American National Character
"What then is the American, this new man?" This question is explored here through the lives and writings of a sequence of imaginative authors each of whom confronted a crucial moment in the evolution of the new nation (from Crevecoeur and the Revolution, through Washington Irving and Jeffersonian Democracy, to James Fenimore Cooper and the Era of Good Feelings). At the centre of these confrontations was a division between those who claimed national perfection had been obtained, and those who, while desperately wanting to believe this, perceived all too clearly that that perfection had not yet come. Rediscovering this neglected literary debate, The Literary Quest for an American National Character illuminates afresh the traumatic birth and development of the new American nation.
Sea Changes
This acclaimed landmark work - in this substantially revised second edition - is a key study of the American cultural experience. It examines the formation of an American personal and national identity through the experience of emigration. It asks what was the 'American difference', and what constitutes the American character. It explores in detail the crucial influence of emigration from Europe. It explores American readiness to change, to break with the past, and its faith in future possibilities. Every one of these supposed qualities is traced by Professor Fender to the psychology of emigration. As a new nation, America had to create and define itself. As the rebellious child of a distant...
Constituting Americanness
Following Koselleck's history of concepts, Americanness is approached as a semantic field at the intersection of several antebellum concepts (nation, representation, sympathy, race, and womanhood, among others), in the various stages of their respective histories. The book is also a period study of major American writers of the antebellum era.
Princes, Peasants, and Other Polish Selves
This book is a case study of the way in which ethnic identities are created and shaped by literature, focusing on the American image of the Pole from the 1830s to the present. Using a vast range of writings, some well known and others long neglected, Thomas S. Gladsky shows how the nineteenth-century view of the Pole as kindred spirit or "beau ideal" was supplanted by other literary models--anarchist, peasant, proletarian, antisemite--and culminated in the present-day idea of ethnicity as the heart of "Americanness". Part One traces the history of Polish ethnicity through the literary inventions of "host-culture" American writers, showing how these surrogates of "otherness" served the needs ...
