Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies

Robert S. Levine

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781108548113
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Inspired by Toni Morrison's call for an interracial approach to American literature, and by recent efforts to globalize American literary studies, Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies ranges widely in its case-study approach to canonical and non-canonical authors. Leading critic Robert S. Levine considers Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, Melville, and other nineteenth-century American writers alongside less well known African American figures such as Nathaniel Paul and Sutton Griggs. He pays close attention to racial representations and ideology in nineteenth-century American writing, while exploring the inevitable tension between the local and the global in this writing. Levine addresses transatlanticism, the Black Atlantic, citizenship, empire, temperance, climate change, black nationalism, book history, temporality, Kantian transnational aesthetics, and a number of other issues. The book also provides a compelling critical frame for understanding developments in American literary studies over the past twenty-five years.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Reading Slavery and Race in “Classic” American Literature
• Chapter 2 Temporality, Race, and Empire in Cooper’s The Deerslayer: The Beginning of the End
• Chapter 3 Fifth of July: Nathaniel Paul and the Circulatory Routes of Black Nationalism
• Chapter 4 American Studies in an Age of Extinction: Poe, Hawthorne, Katrina
• Chapter 5 The Slave Narrative and the Revolutionary Tradition of African American Autobiography
• Chapter 6 “Whiskey, Blacking, and All”: Temperance and Race in William Wells Brown’s Clotel
• Chapter 7 Beautiful Warships: The Transnational Aesthetics of Melville’s Israel Potter
• Chapter 8 Antebellum Rome: Transatlantic Mirrors in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun
• Chapter 9 Edward Everett Hale’s and Sutton E. Griggs’s Men without a Country
• Chapter 10 Frederick Douglass in Fiction: From Harriet Beecher Stowe to James McBride
• Notes
• Index