Cultural Secrets as Narrative Form: Storytelling in Nineteenth-century AmericaCultural Secrets as Narrative Form: Storytelling in Nineteenth-Century America examines the interplay between the familiar and the forgotten in tales of America's first century as a nation. By studying both the common concerns and the rising tensions between the known and the unknown, the told and the untold, this book offers readers new insight into the making of a nation through stories. Here, identity is built not so much through the winnowing competition of perspectives as through the cumulative layering of stories, derived from sources as diverse as rumors circulating in early patriot newspapers and the highest achievements of aesthetic culture. And yet this is not a source study: the interaction of texts is reciprocal, and the texts studied are not simply complementary but often jarring in their interrelations. The result is a new model of just how some of America's central episodes of self-definition -- the Puritan legacy, the Revolutionary War, and the Western frontier -- have achieved near mythic force in the national imagination. The most powerful myths of national identity, this author argues, are not those that erase historical facts but those able to transform such facts into their own deep resources. Book jacket. |
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Page xii
... sense of times and places falling with more than ordinary speed into remoteness . First , this argument is situated in the nationalism of the early nine- teenth century , among the constructed memories of the revolutionary era at a time ...
... sense of times and places falling with more than ordinary speed into remoteness . First , this argument is situated in the nationalism of the early nine- teenth century , among the constructed memories of the revolutionary era at a time ...
Page 138
... sense of familiarity and comfort toward the once mysterious , even menacing , Western frontier . That nostalgia remains ( though less overtly ) entwined with later sections of the novel as well , even as the narrator , as character ...
... sense of familiarity and comfort toward the once mysterious , even menacing , Western frontier . That nostalgia remains ( though less overtly ) entwined with later sections of the novel as well , even as the narrator , as character ...
Page 162
... sense from the easterner's inadequate perspective — west- ern power and authority appear to be totally up in the air through the end of the nineteenth century . One of the dramas enacted in Wister's novel is the narrator's growing sense ...
... sense from the easterner's inadequate perspective — west- ern power and authority appear to be totally up in the air through the end of the nineteenth century . One of the dramas enacted in Wister's novel is the narrator's growing sense ...
Contents
Imagining Cultural Origins in James Fenimore Coopers The | 1 |
Historys Revolutions in Nathaniel Hawthornes The Scarlet | 69 |
6 | 81 |
Copyright | |
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action ambiguity American historical American Literary American Revolution American story argues becomes Billy the Kid Boston British character civil colonial consciousness context Cooper's Spy cowboy Cromwell cultural imagination dangers death Dimmesdale early embodied emergent England experience fact familiar fear fiction figure fragments frame frontier function George Washington Goffe Hawthorne Hawthorne's hero Hester Prynne historical romance human Ibid identity interpretation James James Fenimore Cooper Jane McCrea John André judges King Philip's War knowledge land language layer legends lived meaning memory mystery myth mythic narrative design narrative silence narrator narrator's neutral ground nineteenth century Oedipa Owen Wister paradox Patriot pattern perhaps plot political potential promise Puritan readers regicides revolutionary rhetoric role ryteller Scarlet Letter secrecy secrets sense shift social Spy's storyteller suggest Sutpen's symbolic tale tion tory tradition University Press Virginian vision voice West Western Wister words writes Wyoming York