Cultural Secrets as Narrative Form: Storytelling in Nineteenth-century AmericaCultural Secrets as Narrative Form: Storytelling in Nineteenth-Century America examines the interplay between the familiar and the forgotten in tales of America's first century as a nation. By studying both the common concerns and the rising tensions between the known and the unknown, the told and the untold, this book offers readers new insight into the making of a nation through stories. Here, identity is built not so much through the winnowing competition of perspectives as through the cumulative layering of stories, derived from sources as diverse as rumors circulating in early patriot newspapers and the highest achievements of aesthetic culture. And yet this is not a source study: the interaction of texts is reciprocal, and the texts studied are not simply complementary but often jarring in their interrelations. The result is a new model of just how some of America's central episodes of self-definition -- the Puritan legacy, the Revolutionary War, and the Western frontier -- have achieved near mythic force in the national imagination. The most powerful myths of national identity, this author argues, are not those that erase historical facts but those able to transform such facts into their own deep resources. Book jacket. |
Contents
Imagining Cultural Origins in James Fenimore Coopers The Spy i | 1 |
Historys Revolutions in Nathaniel Hawthornes The Scarlet | 69 |
Traces of a Vanished World in Owen Wisters The Virginian | 133 |
Imagined Contexts for Frontier Heroes | 144 |
The Storytellers Legacy from Quentin Compson | 177 |
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Common terms and phrases
Absalom action ambiguity American Revolution American story argues becomes Billy the Kid Boston British character Charles civil colonial consciousness context Cooper cowboy Cromwell cultural imagination Custom House dangers death Dimmesdale early embody emergent England experience fact familiar fear fiction figure frame frontier function George Washington Goffe Hans Blumenberg Haven Hawthorne Hawthorne’s hero Hester Prynne historical romance human Ibid identity interpretation James James Fenimore Cooper Jane McCrea John André judges knowledge land language layer legend lived meaning memory mystery myth mythic narrative design narrative silence narrator narrator's neutral ground nineteenth century novel Oedipa Owen Wister paradoxically Patriot pattern perhaps plot political potential promise Puritan readers regicides revolutionary rhetoric role Scarlet Letter scene secrecy secret sense shift social society Spy's storyteller suggests Sutpen symbolic tale tion tradition University Press Virginian vision voice Western Whalley Wister words writes Wyoming York