Mixed bloods and other crosses
Subtitle: rethinking American literature from the Revolution to the culture wars
By: Betsy Erkkila.
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Philadelphia
Language: eng
Number of pages: 272
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.
Description: "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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [199]-244) and index.