James Fenimore Cooper's spirited romance has been praised for its authenticity as a portrait of life during America's western movement. At Lake Otsego, during the French and Indian Wars, great frontiersman Natty Bumppo forsakes his love to come to the aid of Thomas Hutter, a trapper under the attack of Iroquois Indians. Published in 1841, The Deerslayer is the first of the Leatherstocking Tales, which reveal the courageous and perseverant nature of the pioneer. Recognized for his descriptive power, Cooper created in Natty Bumppo a mythical character - one of the most significant in the...
James Fenimore Cooper's spirited romance has been praised for its authenticity as a portrait of life during America's western movement. At Lake Otsego...
The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) established William Dean Howells's reputation in the annals of American literature. This collection of essays argues the renewed importance of Howells's novel for an understanding of literature as social force as well as a literary form. In his introduction Donald Pease recounts the fall and rise of the novel's value in literary history, outlines the various critical responses to Silas Lapham, and then restores Silas Lapham to its social context. The essays that follow expand on this theme, challenging the accepted views of literary critics by explicating...
The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) established William Dean Howells's reputation in the annals of American literature. This collection of essays argues t...
The term American Renaissance designates a period in our nation's history when the literary -classics- appeared--works -original- enough to mark a beginning for America's literary history. But the American Renaissance, Donald Pease argues in his introduction, does not belong to the nation's secular history so much as it denotes a rebirth from it: -Independent of the time kept by secular history, the American Renaissance keeps what we could call global Renaissance time--the sacred time a nation claims to renew, when it claims its cultural place as a great nation existing within a...
The term American Renaissance designates a period in our nation's history when the literary -classics- appeared--works -original- enough to ...
"Cultures of United States Imperialism" represents a major paradigm shift that will remap the field of American Studies. Pointing to a glaring blind spot in the basic premises of the study of American culture, leading critics and theorists in cultural studies, history, anthropology, and literature reveal the "denial of empire" at the heart of American Studies. Challenging traditional definitions and periodizations of imperialism, this volume shows how international relations reciprocally shape a dominant imperial culture at home and how imperial relations are enacted and contested within the...
"Cultures of United States Imperialism" represents a major paradigm shift that will remap the field of American Studies. Pointing to a glaring blind s...
National narratives create imaginary relations within imagined communities called national peoples. But in the American narrative, alongside the nexus of belonging established for the national community, the national narrative has represented other peoples (women, blacks, "foreigners," the homeless) from whom the property of nationness has been removed altogether and upon whose differences from them the national people depended for the construction of their norms. Dismantling this opposition has become the task of post-national (Post-Americanist) narratives, bent on changing the assumptions...
National narratives create imaginary relations within imagined communities called national peoples. But in the American narrative, alongside the nexus...
Throughout the era of the Cold War a consensus reigned as to what constituted the great works of American literature. Yet as scholars have increasingly shown, and as this volume unmistakably demonstrates, that consensus was built upon the repression of the voices and historical contexts of subordinated social groups as well as literary works themselves, works both outside and within the traditional canon. This book is an effort to recover those lost voices. Engaging New Historicist, neo-Marxist, poststructuralist, and other literary practices, this volume marks important shifts in the...
Throughout the era of the Cold War a consensus reigned as to what constituted the great works of American literature. Yet as scholars have increasingl...
In "The Slumbering Volcano," Maggie Montesinos Sale investigates depictions of nineteenth-century slave ship revolts to explore the notion of rebellion in formulations of United States national identity. Analyzing how such revolts inspired citizens to debate whether political theory directed at free men could be extended toward blacks, Sale compares the reception of fictionalized versions of ship revolts published in the 1850s--"Benito Cereno" by Herman Melville and "The Heroic Slave" by Frederick Douglass--with the previous decade's public accounts of actual rebellions by enslaved people on...
In "The Slumbering Volcano," Maggie Montesinos Sale investigates depictions of nineteenth-century slave ship revolts to explore the notion of rebellio...
In "The Slumbering Volcano," Maggie Montesinos Sale investigates depictions of nineteenth-century slave ship revolts to explore the notion of rebellion in formulations of United States national identity. Analyzing how such revolts inspired citizens to debate whether political theory directed at free men could be extended toward blacks, Sale compares the reception of fictionalized versions of ship revolts published in the 1850s--"Benito Cereno" by Herman Melville and "The Heroic Slave" by Frederick Douglass--with the previous decade's public accounts of actual rebellions by enslaved people on...
In "The Slumbering Volcano," Maggie Montesinos Sale investigates depictions of nineteenth-century slave ship revolts to explore the notion of rebellio...
