The Construction and Contestation of American Cultures and Identities in the Early National Period

The Construction and Contestation of American Cultures and Identities in the Early National Period

Udo Hebel Editor
This volume collects twenty-four original essays on the formative period of United States literature and culture. Scholars from Germany, England, and the United States explore the emergence and exchange of diverse, at times openly contradictory constructions of the new nation in a variety of discursive fields and cultural practices. Individual contributions focus on the agendas of major writers and politicians (e.g. Wheatley, Franklin, Webster, Hamilton, J. Q. Adams, Brown, Irving, Poe, Paulding), the transformation of the domestic novel, the politics of anthologies, folk art, New England festive culture, economic nationalism, the controversy over the perpetuity of the constitution, the rights of women, the fear of mobocracy, the divisive force of slavery, Indian-white encounters, transatlantic interrelations, and the representation of the young republic in postmodern poetry. Taken together, the articles provide for a fresh reading of the ‘union bound by interest’ as a multivocal site of partisanship and debate.