Description
In recent years, cognitive and affective science have become increasingly important for interpretation and explanation in the social sciences and humanities. However, little of this work has addressed American literature, and virtually none has treated national identity formation in influential works since the Civil War. In this book, Hogan develops his earlier cognitive and affective analyses of national identity, further exploring the ways in which such identity is integrated with cross-culturally recurring patterns in story structure. Hogan examines how authors imagined American identity—understood as universal, democratic egalitarianism—in the face of the nation’s clear and often brutal inequalities of race, sex, and sexuality, exploring the complex and often ambivalent treatment of American identity in works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Eugene O’Neill, Lillian Hellman, Djuna Barnes, Amiri Baraka, Margaret Atwood, N. Scott Momaday, Spike Lee, Leslie Marmon Silko, Tony Kushner, and Heidi Schreck.
Table of Contents
Introduction. Celebratory Nationalism, Critical Nationalism, and Disillusion: America After the Civil War
Chapter One. National Identity and National Emplotment
Part One: Race (I): Native America
Chapter Two: Love and Death: Adapting The Last of the Mohicans
Chapter Three: Heroism, Sacrifice, and Ancestral Memory: N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain
Chapter Four: Blood and Soil: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony
Part Two: Race (II): African America
Chapter Five: Heroic Narrative and Colonialism: Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones
Chapter Six: Heroic Narrative and Black Masculinity: Leroi Jones’s Dutchman and The Slave
Chapter Seven: Against Despair: Spike Lee’s Malcolm X
Part Three: Sexual Orientation
Chapter Eight: Sexual Preference and the Purpose of a Democratic Nation: Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour
Chapter Nine: The National Community and Its Alternatives: Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood
Chapter Ten: Institutions and Communities: Tony Kushner’s Angels in America
Part Four: Sex and Gender
Chapter Eleven: Sex Hierarchies and Utopia: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland
Chapter Twelve: Sex Hierarchies and Dystopia: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
Chapter Thirteen: Sex Hierarchies and the Law Today: Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me
Afterword: A Note on Pessimism of the Intellect and Optimism of the Will
