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This study examines the role interpersonal and place attachments play in crafting a national identity in American literature. Building on ecocritical and psychoanalytic studies, it integrates the language of empirical science and the physical realities of place, investigating non-human agency and that which exists beyond the material realm. It c
List of contents
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
About the author
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.
Summary
This study examines the role interpersonal and place attachments play in crafting a national identity in American literature. Building on ecocritical and psychoanalytic studies, it integrates the language of empirical science and the physical realities of place, investigating non-human agency and that which exists beyond the material realm. It c
