Overview
- Critiques the assumptions of the globalization paradigm that underpins transnational American studies
- Draws on a selection of early U.S. literary works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
- Presents a theoretical mode for engaging with U.S. history applicable for the fields of history, literature, and cultural studies
Part of the book series: Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination (PSGALI)
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
Immunity’s Sovereignty and Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century American Literature tracks flashpoint events in U.S. history, constituting a genealogy of the effectiveness and resilience of the concept of immunity in democratic culture. Rick Rodriguez argues that following the American Revolution the former colonies found themselves subject to foreign and domestic threats imperiling their independence. Wars with North African regencies, responses to the Haitian revolution, reactions to the specter and reality of slave rebellion in the antebellum South, and plans to acquire Cuba to ease tensions between the states all constituted immunizing responses that helped define the conceptual and aesthetic protocols by which the U.S. represented itself to itself and to the world’s nations as distinct, exemplary, and vulnerable. Rodriguez examines these events as expressions of an immunitary logic that was—and still is— frequently deployed to legitimate state authority. Rodriguez identifies contradictions in literary texts’ dramatizations of these transnational events and their attending threats, revealing how democracy’s exposure to its own fragility serves as rationale for immunity’s sovereignty. This book shows how early U.S. literature, often conceived as a delivery system for American exceptionalism, is in effect critical of such immunitary discourses.
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Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Rick Rodriguez is Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College, The City University of New York, USA.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Immunity's Sovereignty and Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Authors: Rick Rodriguez
Series Title: Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34013-1
Publisher: Palgrave Pivot Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-34012-4Published: 09 December 2019
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-34015-5Published: 09 December 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-34013-1Published: 26 November 2019
Series ISSN: 2946-4072
Series E-ISSN: 2946-4080
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VIII, 135
Topics: Literary Theory, Comparative Literature, Eighteenth-Century Literature, North American Literature, Latin American/Caribbean Literature, History of the Americas