Overview
In this broad ranging study, Gretchen Woertendyke reconfigures US literary history as a product of hemispheric relations. Hemispheric Regionalism: Romance and the Geography of Genre, brings together a rich archive of popular culture, fugitive slave narratives, advertisements, political treatises, and literature to construct a new literary history from a hemispheric and regional perspective. At the center of this history is romance, a popular and versatile literary genre uniquely capable of translating the threat posed by the Haitian Revolution--or the expansionist possibilities of Cuban annexation--for a rapidly increasing readership. Through romance, she traces imaginary and real circuits of exchange and remaps romance's position in nineteenth century life and letters as irreducible to, nor fully mediated by, a concept of nation. The energies associated with Cuba and Haiti, manifest destiny and apocalypse, bring historical depth to an otherwise short national history. As a result, romance becomes remarkably influential in inculcating a sense of new world citizenry. The study shifts our critical focus from novel and nation, to romance and region, inevitable, she argues, when we attend to the tangled, messy relations across geographic and historical boundaries.Woertendyke reads the archives of Gabriel Prosser, Nat Turner, and Denmark Vesey along with less frequently treated writers such as John Howison, William Gilmore Simms, and J.H. Ingraham. The study provides a new context for understanding works by Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and James Fenimore Cooper and brings together the theories of Charles Brockden Brown, the editorial work of Maturin M. Ballou, and the historical romances of Walter Scott. In Hemispheric Regionalism, Woertendyke demonstrates that US literature has always been the product of hemispheric and regional relations and that all forms of romance are central to this history.
Full Product Details
Author: Gretchen J. Woertendyke (Associate Professor of English, Associate Professor of English, University of South Carolina)
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions:
Width: 23.60cm
, Height: 2.30cm
, Length: 15.70cm
Weight: 0.454kg
ISBN: 9780190212278
ISBN 10: 0190212276
Pages: 224
Publication Date: 28 July 2016
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: To order
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.
Reviews
Hemispheric Regionalism delivers powerfully, making an important shift away from 'novel and nation to romance and region'--and allowing us, paradoxically, to better understand the emergence and development of US literary nationalism. Full of nuanced readings and theoretical rigor, this book will matter--and will change the way we think about American romance, the trajectory of US literature, and the future of hemispheric studies. -- Anna Brickhouse, author of The Unsettlement of America: Translation, Interpretation, and the Story of Don Luis de Velasco, 1560-1945
Author Information
Gretchen J. Woertendyke is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina.
