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A systematic study of the most iconic national character in the US in nineteenth-century literature and culture
In 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.
Stefanie Schäfer is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie research fellow at the University of Vienna.
List of contents
Introduction; 1. John Bull and Brother Jonathan, a Transatlantic Affair; 2. Theater of/for the Nation: The Stage Yankee as Metatheatric Sign; 3. The Yankee Peddler Conjures an American Marketplace; 4. New England's "Homespun Yankee" in the Cultural and Literary Imagination; 5. Yankee Politics: A Coda; 6. Bibliography; Appendices; Index.
About the author
Stefanie Schäfer is a Marie-Curie research fellow at the University of Vienna, Austria. She has been professor of American Studies at Erlangen-Nürnberg and Augsburg, Germany. She specialises in Transnational American Studies and Canadian Studies, Gender Studies, and Popular Culture.
