Transnational Na(rra)tion: Home and Homeland in Nineteenth-Century American Literature [Paperback]

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

Acknowledgments
Pre-lude: Performance Criticism
Overture: Benjamin Franklin: A House is not a Home
First Movement: Washington Irving: The Cutting Edge of Gross Anatomy
Second Movement: Frederick Douglass: Domestic Hardships and Capital Gains
Third Movement: Louisa May Alcott: The Dividends of Foreign Exchange
Fourth Movement: Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Citizen of Somewhere Else
Finale: Mark Twain: Beauty and the (B)east
Bibliography
Index
About the Author