1st Edition

Attachment, Place, and Otherness in Nineteenth-Century American Literature New Materialist Representations

By Jillmarie Murphy Copyright 2018
168 Pages
by Routledge

168 Pages
by Routledge

168 Pages
by Routledge

This interdisciplinary study examines the role interpersonal and place attachment bonds play in crafting a national identity in American literature. Although there have been numerous ecocritical studies of and psychoanalytic approaches to American literature, this study seeks to integrate the language of empirical science and the physical realities of place, while also investigating non-human... Read more

Acknowledgements





Introduction



Chapter 1. Dispossession, Diseased Attachments, and the Transmogrifying Self in Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn



Chapter 2. Fugitivity and Displaced Bodies in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, the Horrors of Saint Domingo



Chapter 3. George Lippard’s Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall and the Transformational Place of Mid-Nineteenth Century Urban Fiction



Chapter 4. Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes, and the Precarity of Place in Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Frank Norris’s McTeague



Chapter 5. African-American Place Attachments and the Chains of Modernity in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Sport of the Gods





Index

Biography

Jillmarie Murphy is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at Union College, Schenectady, NY. She has published books, journal articles, and essays that focus on Puritan poetics, literature of the early American Republic, prominent and lesser-known antebellum literary figures, and transatlantic novelists who span the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her publications generally employ the psycho-social paradigm of attachment theory, drawing on topics considering parenting, gender, race, class, and ethnicity, as well as publications that consider the evolution of literary history and how certain authors and texts resonate long after their heyday.