Transnational Na(rra)tion: Home and Homeland in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

by John Dolis

Overview

This book examines American literary texts whose portrayal of "American" identity involves the incorporation of a "foreign body" as the precondition for a comprehensive understanding of itself. This nexus of disconcerting textual dynamics arises precisely insofar as both citizen/subject and national identity depend upon a certain alterity, an "other" which constitutes the secondary term of a binary structure. "American" identity thus finds itself ironically con-fused and interwoven with another culture or another nation, double-crossed in the enactment of itself. Individual chapters are devoted to Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611478174
Publisher:	University Press Copublishing Division
Publication date:	04/12/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	246
Product dimensions:	5.86(w) x 9.11(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

John Dolis is professor of English and American studies at Penn State University, Scranton.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Pre-lude: Performance Criticism
Overture: Benjamin Franklin: A House is not a Home
First Movement: Washington Irving: The Cutting Edge of Gross Anatomy
Second Movement: Frederick Douglass: Domestic Hardships and Capital Gains
Third Movement: Louisa May Alcott: The Dividends of Foreign Exchange
Fourth Movement: Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Citizen of Somewhere Else
Finale: Mark Twain: Beauty and the (B)east
Bibliography
Index
About the Author