Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe
J. Gerald Kennedy
Abstract
After the War of 1812, Americans belatedly realized that they lacked national identity. The subsequent campaign to articulate nationality transformed every facet of culture from architecture to painting, and in the realm of letters, literary jingoism embroiled American authors in the heated politics of nationalism. The age demanded stirring images of US virtue, often achieved by contriving myths and obscuring brutalities. Between these sanitized narratives of the nation and US social reality lay a grotesque discontinuity. Official culture masked the unresolved contradictions of US nationhood—w ... More
After the War of 1812, Americans belatedly realized that they lacked national identity. The subsequent campaign to articulate nationality transformed every facet of culture from architecture to painting, and in the realm of letters, literary jingoism embroiled American authors in the heated politics of nationalism. The age demanded stirring images of US virtue, often achieved by contriving myths and obscuring brutalities. Between these sanitized narratives of the nation and US social reality lay a grotesque discontinuity. Official culture masked the unresolved contradictions of US nationhood—which restricted the “inalienable” right of freedom by race, class, and gender. As vehement conflicts over slavery, Indian removal, immigration, and territorial expansion divided the country, authors such as Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine M. Sedgwick, William Gilmore Simms, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Lydia Maria Child wrestled uneasily with the imperative to revise history to produce national fable. Counter-narratives by fugitive slaves, Native Americans, and defiant women subverted literary nationalism by exposing the plight of the unfree and dispossessed. Unlike most contemporaries, Edgar Allan Poe openly mocked literary nationalism and deplored the celebration of “stupid” books appealing to provincial self-congratulation. In weird Gothic tales often set in Europe, he sought to make visible the terrifying strangeness of the nation he inhabited.
Keywords:
American identity,
literary nationalism,
national narratives,
US nationhood,
contradictions,
strangeness
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780195393682 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2016 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195393682.001.0001 |
