Yankee Yarns : : Storytelling and the Invention of the National Body in Nineteenth-Century American Culture / / Stefanie Schäfer.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2022 English
• VerfasserIn: Schäfer, Stefanie,
• MitwirkendeR: Boggs, Colleen Glenney,; Doyle, Laura,; Fumagalli, Maria Cristina,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2022]; ©2021
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Edinburgh Critical Studies in Atlantic Literatures and Cultures : ECSALC
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (324 p.) :; 17 B/W illustrations

A systematic study of the most iconic national character in the US in nineteenth-century literature and cultureYankee Yarns provides the first systematic study of the Yankee’s formation in 19th century US cultureCritiques US national historiographies by revealing an indulgence in storytelling, fraudulence, and self-irony at the heart of the US national characterArgues that US national culture is originally transnational and transatlanticIn this book, Stefanie Schäfer provides the first study of the Yankee’s many facets. Reading together Yankee Doodle, Brother Jonathan, Uncle Sam, the Yankee Peddler and the Down Easter, she highlights the Yankee’s ambiguity: His performance hinges on storytelling and fraudulence. An invention of transatlantic origin, the Yankee straddles regional and sectional, rural and urban, working class and bourgeois US identities. For nineteenth-century audiences at home and abroad, he becomes the hegemonic embodiment of US national character, its political and material culture and the homespun agent of its imperial fantasies.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Series Editors’ Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. John Bull and Brother Jonathan: A Transatlantic Affair -- Chapter 2. Theater of/for the Nation: The Stage Yankee as Metatheatric Sign -- Chapter 3. The Yankee Peddler Conjures an American Marketplace -- Chapter 4. New England’s “Homespun Yankee” in the Cultural and Literary Imagination -- Chapter 5. Yankee Politics: A Coda -- Appendices -- Bibliography -- Index -- Plates