Overview

An in-depth examination of liminality and race in early US fiction Offers a Critical Whiteness study of early US fiction with innovative readings of canonical and lesser-known texts Brings together fiction and multiple discourses on White racial identity in the early US: natural history, medical science, blackface minstrelsy, abolitionism and anti-abolitionism, mesmerism, spiritualism Contributes to ongoing work in early US fiction race studies by reading White male characters as figures of otherness Hannah Lauren Murray shows that early US authors repeatedly imagined lost, challenged and negated White racial identity in the new nation. In a Critical Whiteness reading of canonical and lesser-known texts from Charles Brockden Brown to Frank J. Webb, Murray argues that White characters on the border between life and death were liminal presences that disturbed prescriptions of racial belonging in the early US. Fears of losing Whiteness were routinely channelled through the language of liminality, in a precursor to today's White anxieties of marginalisation and minoritisation.

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9781474481748

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Reviews

"""As scholars of American literature and history know, White dread has been a haunting presence for a long, long time. Anxious fantasies of replacement, subsumption, diminution: in Liminal Whiteness, Hannah Murray raises these spirits, and gets them to speak in new tongues. Across agile readings of figures from Brockden Brown, Poe and Melville to Robert Montgomery Bird and Frank Webb, Liminal Whiteness vivifies a rich literary counter-history and gives us new purchase on the shifting terrain of reactive White fantasy."" -Peter Coviello, University of Illinois Chicago"

Author Information

Hannah Lauren Murray is Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Liverpool. Her research centres on race and citizenship in nineteenth-century American literature, with a specific focus on speculative genres. She has previously published in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (2020), The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown (Oxford UP, 2019) and the Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies (2017) and she sits on the steering committee for the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (BrANCA).

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