Overview

This book examines American literary texts whose portrayal of ""American"" identity involves the incorporation of a ""foreign body"" as the precondition for a comprehensive understanding of itself. This nexus of disconcerting textual dynamics arises precisely insofar as both citizen/subject and national identity depend upon a certain alterity, an ""other"" which constitutes the secondary term of a binary structure. ""American"" identity thus finds itself ironically con-fused and interwoven with another culture or another nation, double-crossed in the enactment of itself. Individual chapters are devoted to Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain.

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9781611478174

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John Dolis is professor of English and American studies at Penn State University, Scranton.

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