Medieval America: Feudalism and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century U.S. CultureMedieval America analyzes literary, legal, and historical archives that help tell a new story about the formation of American culture. Against Cold War–era studies of U.S. culture that argued, following political scientist Louis Hartz’s “liberal consensus” model, that the United States emerged from the Revolutionary era free from Europe’s feudal institutions and uninterested in the production of its medieval culture productions, Robert Yusef Rabiee contends that feudal law and medieval literature were structural components of the American cultural imaginary in the nineteenth century. |
Contents
1 | |
CHAPTER ONE Plantation Romance and Southern Medievalism in Poes Magazine Fiction | 25 |
Coopers Feudal Claims | 60 |
Harriet Jacobs and E D E N Southworth | 95 |
Ridges The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta and Melvilles Benito Cereno | 128 |