Overview

A systematic study of the most iconic national character in the US in nineteenth-century literature and culture Yankee Yarns provides the first systematic study of the Yankee's formation in 19th century US culture Critiques US national historiographies by revealing an indulgence in storytelling, fraudulence, and self-irony at the heart of the US national character Argues that US national culture is originally transnational and transatlantic In this book, Stefanie Sch fer 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.

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9781474477451

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"""Bridging literary and cultural studies, Stefanie Sch fer considers the Yankee in various guises: as national representative, stage performer, wily businessman, and regional personality. With lively visual examples and rich archival materials,?Yankee Yarns?interrogates gendered and racialized notions of U.S. identity and offers fresh, valuable insights on the transatlantic creation of American character."" -Leslie E. Eckel, Suffolk University"

Author Information

Stefanie Sch fer is a Marie-Curie research fellow at the University of Vienna, Austria. She has been professor of American Studies at Erlangen-N rnberg and Augsburg, Germany. She specialises in Transnational American Studies and Canadian Studies, Gender Studies, and Popular Culture.

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