Constituting Americanness; A History of the Concept and Its Representations in Antebellum American Literature (11) (American Culture)

Biografía del autor:

Iulian Cananau is a senior lecturer in American Literature at the University of Gavle (Sweden). Previously, he worked as an assistant professor in American Studies at the English Department of the University of Bucharest. He was the recipient of a Fulbright research grant at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge (USA).

Reseña del editor:

This work in cultural history and literary criticism suggests a fresh and fruitful approach to the old notion of &ltI>Americanness</I>. Following Reinhart Koselleck's &ltI>Begriffsgeschichte</I>, the author proposes that &ltI>Americanness </I>is not an ordinary word, but a concept with a historically specific semantic field. In the three decades before the Civil War, &ltI>Americanness </I>was constituted at the intersection of several concepts, in different stages of their respective histories; among these, nation, representation, individualism, sympathy, race, and womanhood. By tracing the representations of these concepts in literary texts of the antebellum era and investigating their overlapping with the rhetoric of national identification, this study uncovers some of the meaning of &ltI>Americanness </I>in that period.

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.