Immigration, Ethnicity, and Class in American Writing, 1830-1860: Reading the Stranger
Book Details
Author(s)Leonardo Buonomo
PublisherFairleigh Dickinson
ISBN / ASIN1611476526
ISBN-139781611476521
AvailabilityUsually ships in 24 hours
Sales Rank6,811,772
MarketplaceUnited States 🇺🇸
Description
This book examines the close relationship between the portrayal of foreigners and the delineation of culture and identity in antebellum American writing. Both literary and historical in its approach, this study shows how, in a period marked by extensive immigration, heated debates on national and racial traits, during a flowering in American letters, encouraged responses from American authors to outsiders that not only contain precious insights into nineteenth-century America’s self-construction but also serve to illuminate our own time’s multicultural societies. The authors under consideration are alternately canonical (Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville), recently rediscovered (Kirkland), or simply neglected (Arthur). The texts analyzed cover such different genres as diaries, letters, newspapers, manuals, novels, stories, and poems.
