Title: Mixed bloods and other crosses : rethinking American literature from the Revolution to the culture wars /
Authors: Erkkila, Betsy, 1944-
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press,
Year: 2005
Subjects: American literature History and criticism; Literature and society United States.; Racially mixed people in literature.; Social conflict in literature.; Minorities in literature; Ethnicity in literature.; Violence in literature.; Racism in literature.
Abstract: "In Mixed Bloods and Other Crosses, Betsy Erkkila argues that it is through the historical and psychological dramas of blood as a marker of violence, or race, or sex, or kinship that Americans have struggled over the meanings of democracy, citizenship, culture, national belonging, and the idea of America itself as it was constituted and contested in its relations with others and the world. Whether blood is construed as setting up a boundary incapable of being crossed or is perceived as a site of mixing and hybridity, its imagery has saturated the literature of the American public from the time of the founding. Betsy Erkkila moves from a consideration of contests about territorial, sexual, racial, class, national, and aesthetic borders in the Revolutionary period and the nineteenth century to a discussion of recent contests about the boundaries of culture and the disciplines and the relation between aesthetics and politics, identity and difference, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, the local and the global."--Jacket.
Contents: Blood, sex, and other American crosses -- Mixed bloods: Jefferson, revolution, and the boundaries of America -- Revolutionary women -- The poetics of whiteness: Poe and the racial imaginary -- Whitman and the homosexual republic -- Emily Dickinson and class -- Beyond the boundaries: C.L.R. James to Herman Melville.