Constituting Americanness
Subtitle: a History of the Concept and its Representations in Antebellum American Literature
By: Iulian Cananau
Series: American culture -- Band 11
Publisher: Peter Lang GmbH
Published: 2015
Place of publication: Frankfurt am Main
Language: eng
Number of pages: 280
ISBN-13: 9783631657690; 9783653051179
Subjects: American National characteristics; History; Nationalism; Politics and government; Social conditions; Politics and culture; Rhetoric; National characteristics, American, in literature; Nationalism in literature; American literature; History and criticism; Politics and literature
Description: "This work in cultural history and literary criticism suggests a fresh and fruitful approach to the old notion of Americanness. Following Reinhart Koselleck's Begriffsgeschichte, the author proposes that Americanness is not an ordinary word, but a concept with a historically specific semantic field. In the three decades before the Civil War, Americanness was constituted at the intersection of several concepts, in different stages of their respective histories; among these, nation, representation, individualism, sympathy, race, and womanhood. By tracing the representations of these concepts in literary texts of the antebellum era and investigating their over-lapping with the rhetoric of national identification, this study uncovers some of the meaning of Americanness in that period"--Provided by publisher.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 261-274) and index.
Table of contents: title: The history of "Americanness" in American literary studies; title: Ethnicity, race, and whiteness in ethnic conceptions of Americanness; title: Methodological considerations toward a theory of Americanness and its contribution to American literary history; title: Americanness, Americanism, and U.S. national identity; title: Nation; title: Three avatars of American representation : the philosopher, the citizen, and the poet; title: Individualism; title: Sympathy; title: Slavery, race, and racism; title: Womanhood; title: The new order of free enterprise capitalism; title: Afterword.