Immigration, Ethnicity, and Class in American Writing, 18301860

Reading the Stranger

By (author) Leonardo Buonomo

Publication date:

04 December 2013

Length of book:

212 pages

Publisher

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

ISBN-13: 9781611476521

This book examines the close relationship between the portrayal of foreigners and the delineation of culture and identity in antebellum American writing. Both literary and historical in its approach, this study shows how, in a period marked by extensive immigration, heated debates on national and racial traits, during a flowering in American letters, encouraged responses from American authors to outsiders that not only contain precious insights into nineteenth-century America’s self-construction but also serve to illuminate our own time’s multicultural societies. The authors under consideration are alternately canonical (Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville), recently rediscovered (Kirkland), or simply neglected (Arthur). The texts analyzed cover such different genres as diaries, letters, newspapers, manuals, novels, stories, and poems.

Acknowledgments
Prologue: Eyes on the Stranger
Introduction
1. Face to Face with the Stranger
1.1. Ralph Waldo Emerson on National Identity
1.2. Herman Melville’s Redburn: In the Company of Strangers
1.3. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Foreign Reflections
2. The Domestic Other
2.1. James Fenimore Cooper: Defining Master and Servant
2.2. Walt Whitman: A Sympathetic Glance at “Bridget”
3. Landscape with Strangers
3.1. Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Changing Face of America
3.2. Henry David Thoreau and His Foreign Neighbors
4. Views from the City
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index

Buonomo sheds new light on canonical and lesser-known writers. . . .Buonomo’s rigorously documented archival work is enlightening and inspiring, and the strength of his argument, coupled with his refusal to simplify or to dismiss the myriad ambiguities and complexities of the topic at hand, make the book a precious contribution to the scholarship on 19th-century American literature and culture, and on both Ethnic Studies and Whiteness Studies. . . .In this volume, Leonardo Buonomo has not only convincingly put the foreigner at center stage . . . but he has claimed a fundamental position for it at the heart of the national identity formation. In doing so, his work acquires an important currency in today’s cultural and political landscape, as it mirrors and evokes contemporary debates on migration, on the relationship between multiculturalism and national identities, on racism and class struggle, and on seemingly unbridgeable cultural gaps between contiguous communities.