Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative FormDuke University Press, 1995 - Počet stran: 390 Ever since the founders drafted "We the People," "we" have been at pains to work out the contradictions in their formulation, to fix in words precisely what it means to be American. Constituting Americans rethinks the way that certain writers of the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century contributed to this project; in doing so, it revises the traditional narrative of U.S. literary history, restoring an essential chapter to the story of an emerging American cultural identity. In diverse ways, very different writers—including Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Harriet Wilson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Gertrude Stein—participated in the construction and dissemination of an American identity, but none was entirely at ease in the culture they all helped to define. Evident in their work is a haunting sense of their telling someone else’s story, a discomfort that Priscilla Wald reads in the context of legal and political debates about citizenship and personhood that marked the emergence of the United States as a nation and a world power. From early-nineteenth-century Supreme Court cases to turn-of-the-century Jim Crow and immigration legislation, from the political speeches of Abraham Lincoln to the historical work of Woodrow Wilson, nation-builders addressed the legal, political, and historical paradoxes of American identity. Against the backdrop of their efforts, Wald shows how works such as Douglass’s autobiographical narratives, Melville’s Pierre, Wilson’s Our Nig, Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folks, and Stein’s The Making of Americans responded, through formal innovations, to the aggressive demands for literary participation in the building of that nation. The conversation that emerges among these literary works challenges the definitions and genres that largely determine not only what works are read, but also how they are read in classrooms in the United States today. Offering insight into the relationship of storytelling to national identity, Constituting Americans will compel the attention of those with an interest in American literature, American studies, and cultural studies. |
Vyhledávání v knize
Výsledky 1-5 z 76
Strana iv
... Stein's personal correspon- dence are taken from the Yale Collection of American Lit- erature , Rare Book and Manuscript Library , Yale Univer- sity , and are used by permission . For Audrey and Stanley , Evan and Nathaniel Abbreviations ...
... Stein's personal correspon- dence are taken from the Yale Collection of American Lit- erature , Rare Book and Manuscript Library , Yale Univer- sity , and are used by permission . For Audrey and Stanley , Evan and Nathaniel Abbreviations ...
Strana ix
... Stein , The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Abraham Lincoln : His Speeches and Writings William Blackstone , Commentaries on the Laws of England Anzia Yezierska , Bread Givers Frantz Fanon , Black Skin , White Masks BW Barbara A. White ...
... Stein , The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Abraham Lincoln : His Speeches and Writings William Blackstone , Commentaries on the Laws of England Anzia Yezierska , Bread Givers Frantz Fanon , Black Skin , White Masks BW Barbara A. White ...
Strana x
... Stein , " The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans " Walter Benn Michaels , The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism GWFA Washington's Farewell Address HHM Herman Melville , " Hawthorne and His Mosses " HJ Harriet A. Jacobs ...
... Stein , " The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans " Walter Benn Michaels , The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism GWFA Washington's Farewell Address HHM Herman Melville , " Hawthorne and His Mosses " HJ Harriet A. Jacobs ...
Strana xi
... Stein and Leon M. Solomons , " Normal Motor Automatism " N. S. Shaler , " European Peasants as Immigrants " NS NSV Thomas Jefferson , Notes on the State of Virginia NWL Letters of Noah Webster NWS Noah Webster Speller ON 00 Harriet E ...
... Stein and Leon M. Solomons , " Normal Motor Automatism " N. S. Shaler , " European Peasants as Immigrants " NS NSV Thomas Jefferson , Notes on the State of Virginia NWL Letters of Noah Webster NWS Noah Webster Speller ON 00 Harriet E ...
Strana xiii
... Stein's personal correspondence . Grateful acknowledgment is made to all of the following for permission to reprint previously published work . A version of the first section of chapter 1 appeared earlier as " Terms of Assimilation ...
... Stein's personal correspondence . Grateful acknowledgment is made to all of the following for permission to reprint previously published work . A version of the first section of chapter 1 appeared earlier as " Terms of Assimilation ...
Obsah
Neither Citizen nor Alien National Narratives Frederick Douglass and the Politics of SelfDefinition | 16 |
As From a Faithful Mirror Pierre Our Nig and Literary Nationalism | 108 |
The Strange Meaning of Being Black The Souls of Black Folk and the Narrative of History | 174 |
A LosingSelf Sense The Making of Americans and the Anxiety of Identity | 239 |
An American We | 301 |
Notes | 307 |
Selected Bibliography | 355 |
377 | |
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Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form Priscilla Wald Náhled není k dispozici. - 1994 |
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