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. |
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Strana iv
... United States of America on acid - free paper ∞ Designed by Cherie Holma Westmoreland Typeset in Bodoni Book by Keystone Typesetting , Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging - in - Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this ...
... United States of America on acid - free paper ∞ Designed by Cherie Holma Westmoreland Typeset in Bodoni Book by Keystone Typesetting , Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging - in - Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this ...
Strana 2
... United States Constitution called " We the People . " With the emergence of the United States as a world power at the turn of the twentieth century , educators and legislators evolved national narratives that could channel the challenge ...
... United States Constitution called " We the People . " With the emergence of the United States as a world power at the turn of the twentieth century , educators and legislators evolved national narratives that could channel the challenge ...
Strana 3
... United States . My investigation of literary responses to nationalist initiatives has led me to a grouping of writers that does not conform to the classifications of more familiar literary historical narratives , classifications ...
... United States . My investigation of literary responses to nationalist initiatives has led me to a grouping of writers that does not conform to the classifications of more familiar literary historical narratives , classifications ...
Strana 10
... United States struggled to define itself as a nation in the mid - nineteenth century and later as it contended with the difficulties of its emergence as a world power at the turn of the twentieth century . Of course the nature of those ...
... United States struggled to define itself as a nation in the mid - nineteenth century and later as it contended with the difficulties of its emergence as a world power at the turn of the twentieth century . Of course the nature of those ...
Strana 15
... United States . Doug- lass's desire to address those questions was as troubling to many ante- bellum audiences as the actual content of any story that he might tell . He wished to make those audiences experience the anguish not only of ...
... United States . Doug- lass's desire to address those questions was as troubling to many ante- bellum audiences as the actual content of any story that he might tell . He wished to make those audiences experience the anguish not only of ...
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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