Constituting Americans : cultural anxiety and narrative form
"Ever since the founders drafted "We the people," "we" have been at pains to work out the contradictions in their formulation, to fix in words precisely what it means to be American. Constituting Americans rethinks the way that certain writers of the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century contributed to this project; in doing so, it revises the traditional narrative of U.S. literary history, restoring an essential chapter to the story of an emerging American cultural identity. In diverse ways, very different writers--including Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Harriet Wilson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Gertrude Stein--participated in the construction and dissemination of an American identity, but none was entirely at ease in the culture they all helped to define. Evident in their work is a haunting sense of their telling someone else's story, a discomfort that Priscilla Wald reads in the context of legal and political debates about citizenship and personhood that marked the emergence of the United States as a nation and a world power."--Provided by publisher
Criticism, interpretation, etc
1 online resource (xiv, 390 pages)
9780822381907, 0822381907
1086136890
Neither citizen nor alien : national narratives, Frederick Douglass, and the politics of self-definition
"As from a faithful mirror : Pierre, Our Nig, and literary nationalism
"The strange meaning of being black" : The souls of black folk and the narrative of history
A "losing-self sense" : The making of Americans and the anxiety of identity
Coda: An American "we."
Electronic reproduction, [Place of publication not identified], HathiTrust Digital Library, 2019
English