
The Troubled Union
Expansionist Imperatives in Post-Reconstruction American Novels
John Moran Gonzalez(Author)
Ohio State University Press
Published on 9. October 2020
Book
Paperback/Softback
158 pages
978-0-8142-5636-7 (ISBN)
Description
In The Troubled Union: Expansionist Imperatives in Post-Reconstruction American Novels, John Morán González traces the imperialist imaginings behind literary efforts to reunite the United States after the trauma of the Civil War and Reconstruction. This innovative study explores how the U.S. historical romance attempted to rebuild a national identity by renovating Manifest Destiny for the twentieth-century imperialist future through courtship and marriage plots. Yet even as these literary romances promised expansive national futures, the racial and gender contradictions of U.S. democracy threatened to result in troubled unions at home and fractious ventures abroad. Canonical authors such as Henry James, popular authors such as Helen Hunt Jackson, and rediscovered authors such as María Amparo Ruiz de Burton provide the dramatic narratives examined in this book.
Employing theoretical perspectives drawn from American Studies and Latin American Studies, González highlights the importance of the "domestic"-understood as both the domestic boundaries of the nation and of the home-as a key site within civil society that maintained and renewed imperialist national subjectivities. The Troubled Union combines the formal analysis of literary genre with interdisciplinary cultural studies to elucidate just how the imperial national allegory deeply structured the U.S. cultural imagination of the late nineteenth century.
More details
Language
English
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 9 mm
Weight
240 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8142-5636-7 (9780814256367)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
John Morán González is associate professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin.