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Full Description
An in-depth examination of liminality and race in early US fiction
Offers a Critical Whiteness study of early US fiction with innovative readings of canonical and lesser-known texts
Brings together fiction and multiple discourses on White racial identity in the early US: natural history, medical science, blackface minstrelsy, abolitionism and anti-abolitionism, mesmerism, spiritualism
Contributes to ongoing work in early US fiction race studies by reading White male characters as figures of otherness
Hannah Lauren Murray shows that early US authors repeatedly imagined lost, challenged and negated White racial identity in the new nation. In a Critical Whiteness reading of canonical and lesser-known texts from Charles Brockden Brown to Frank J. Webb, Murray argues that White characters on the border between life and death were liminal presences that disturbed prescriptions of racial belonging in the early US. Fears of losing Whiteness were routinely channelled through the language of liminality, in a precursor to today's White anxieties of marginalisation and minoritisation.
Contents
Acknowledgements A Note on Language Introduction: Inexplicable Voices: Liminal Whiteness in the Early United States
1. 'A shriek so terrible!': Charles Brockden Brown's Sensational Ventriloquists 2. 'This is a story-telling age': Spectral Nostalgia in Washington Irving's Bracebridge Hall 3. 'What had become of me?': Sheppard Lee's Blackface Transformation 4. 'I say to you that I am dead!': Edgar Allan Poe's Protesting Cadavers 5. 'How can I speak to thee?': Herman Melville's Muted Voice 6. 'I'm making a white man of him': Making and Breaking Whiteness in The Garies and their Friends
Coda: The Resurrection of Whiteness BibliographyIndex
