Vendor
	Edward Everett Root John Spiers
Original language
English
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies Literature: history & criticism Migration, immigration & emigration

Sea Changes: British Emigration & American Literature

Stephen Fender

This acclaimed landmark work – in this substantially revised second edition – is a key study of the American cultural experience. It examines the formation of an American personal and national identity through the experience of emigration. It asks what was the ‘American difference’, and what constitutes the American character. It explores in detail the crucial influence of emigration from Europe. It explores American readiness to change, to break with the past, and its faith in future possibilities. Every one of these supposed qualities is traced by Professor Fender to the psychology of emigration.

As a new nation, America had to create and define itself. As the rebellious child of a distant but powerful parent America had to struggle against a metropolitan center with which it shared a language and a legal system, but it strenuously defined itself differently.

This work is about the power of American ideology and how it unlocked the creative potential in the lives and writings for ‘ordinary’ people. It is a work like no other. It says much that is original on writers such as Cooper, Jefferson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Dreiser and Will Cather, among others. Professor Fender has also examined many accounts of ordinary people through diaries, letters and contemporary documents.

The book examines how innovations in structures of life, government and writing entailed key cultural themes. It argues that the rhetoric in which emigration was promoted, defended and attacked became the exhilarations and the anxieties of the American difference. American literature thus returns repeatedly to narratives of captivity, adolescence and initiation as shown in its distinctive literary forms.

Contents:

CULTURE AND NATURE: The British idea of America and how it became politicized; the rhetoric of renunciation; the American cultural project.

RITES OF PASSAGE: The passage over; Individual reformation as a model for the reformed community; Narratives of initiation, raw and cooked.

FALLING AWAY: Disappointed immigrants; alternative voices to the dominant ideology; Back migrants who turned themselves into travellers.

"RUINS SO SOON!" Reveries of European culture; The figure of death in life; The past as lost.

JAMES, WHARTON AND THE INTERNATIONAL THEME: The American discovery of Europe and the problems it caused.

Bibliography; Notes; Index.

Comments

“promises to become a classic of its kind; it combines impressive knowledge of American history and literature with a remarkable sensitivity to the language of common letter-writers and diarists.” – Edwin J. Barton, American Literature.

“a rich and fascinating work which illuminates in a new way the crucial constitutive American experience.” – Professor Tony Tanner, Kling’s College, Cambridge.

“Every part of his book is an eye-opener.” – Professor Sheldon Rothblatt, London Review of Books