American Literature and American Identity

A Cognitive Cultural Study From the Revolution Through the Civil War

Patrick Colm Hogan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000062021
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Literaturkritik

American Literature and American Identity addresses the crucial issue of identity formation, especially national identity, in influential works of American literature. Patrick Colm Hogan uses techniques of cognitive and affective science to examine the complex and often highly ambivalent treatment of American identity in works by Melville, Cooper, Sedgwick, Apess, Stowe, Jacobs, Douglass, Hawthorne, Poe, and Judith Sargeant Murray. Hogan focuses on the issue of how authors imagined American identity—specifically, as universal, democratic egalitarianism—in the face of the nation's clear and often brutal inequalities of race and sex. In the course of this study, Hogan advances our understanding of nationalism in general, American identity in particular, and the widely read literary works he examines.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• A note on usage
• Introduction: The complex ambivalence of being us
• 1. What is identity? And what is American?
• 2. The Last of the Mohicans: Senility and love in a new nation
• 3. Hope Leslie: Critique, defiance, and ambivalence
• 4. William Apess: A Native American writes back
• 5. Uncle Tom’s Cabin: The childhood model and delegitimating U.S nationalism
• 6. Harriet Jacobs, women’s friendship, and antinationalism
• 7. Frederick Douglass, manhood, and the lost home
• 8. The Scarlet Letter: Sexuality, sin, and spiritual realization
• 9. Poe’s “The Black Cat”: An allegory of misogyny
• 10. Judith Sargent Murray: Women’s virtue and the equality of the sexes
• 11. Moby Dick Interracial romance beyond the nation
• Afterword: In place of a premature conclusion
• References
• Index