- Title Information
- Title
- Divisible Pasts: Nostalgia and Narrative in American Literature and Culture, 1848 ? 1900
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Funchion, John R.
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- creator
- Origin Information
- Copyright Date
(encoding="w3cdtf", keyDate="yes")
- 2008
- Physical Description
- Extent
- vii, 230 p.
- digitalOrigin
- born digital
- Note
- Thesis (Ph.D.) -- Brown University (2008)
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Gould, Philip
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- director
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Burrows, Stuart
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- reader
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Nabers, Deak
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- reader
- Name:
Corporate
- Name Part
- Brown University. English
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- sponsor
- Genre (aat)
- theses
- Abstract
- This dissertation maintains that nostalgia played a formative role in animating several competing diasporic American nationalisms in the nineteenth century. Nostalgia is often
dismissed as a facile affective reaction to the conditions of modernity and the rise of a monolithic American nation-state. By contrast, I argue that nineteenth-century writers used nostalgia to
produce social spaces that united disparate populations through a shared sense of exile from a past, place, or people. In other words, temporal discontinuity and spatial estrangement?what
critics generally have seen as obstacles to nationalism?actually served as the necessary preconditions for creating a national community based on nostalgia. While classified as a disease of the
imagination in eighteenth-century medical literature, nostalgia came to define sectional feeling and created competing accounts of the past in the nineteenth century. Instead of imagining the
nation and its past in homogeneous and contiguous terms, writers like William Wells Brown and Herman Melville participated in this sectionalist discourse and used tropes of diaspora to suggest
that U.S. identity could be imagined from a place of exile where nostalgia binds one to a particular place or nation through a sense of longing. Since the Civil War only brought about a tenuous
political resolution to the sectional conflict, I read work by Augusta J. Evans and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton to argue that Reconstruction-era writers used nostalgia to imagine the U.S. as a
loose confederation of sectional cultures produced by mutual regional intolerances. In the 1880s and 1890s, I demonstrate, Walt Whitman and Hamlin Garland employed nostalgia to redefine
sectional antagonisms along economic lines of interest in the service of Populism. I conclude by examining L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), which creates a technologically
reproducible nostalgia emptied of its content to make every place like home, so that at the same time "there is no place like home."
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- Nineteenth-Century American Literature
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- History of the Novel
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- American Studies
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- Cultural Theory
- Subject (FAST)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/1039536")
- Topic
- Nostalgia
- Record Information
- Record Content Source (marcorg)
- RPB
- Record Creation Date
(encoding="iso8601")
- 20091218
- Language
- Language Term:
Code (ISO639-2B)
- eng
- Language Term:
Text
- English
- Identifier:
DOI
- 10.7301/Z0TD9VNX
- Access Condition:
rights statement
(href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/")
- In Copyright
- Access Condition:
restriction on access
- Collection is open for research.
- Type of Resource (primo)
- dissertations