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Posthumous America - Literary Reinventions of America at the End of the Eighteenth Century (Paperback)
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Posthumous America - Literary Reinventions of America at the End of the Eighteenth Century (Paperback)
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Benjamin Hoffmann's Posthumous America examines the literary
idealization of a lost American past in the works of French writers
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For writers such as
John Hector St. John de Crevecoeur and Claude-Francois de
Lezay-Marnesia, America was never more potent as a driving ideal
than in its loss. Examining the paradoxical American paradise
depicted in Crevecoeur's Lettres d'un cultivateur americain (1784);
the "uchronotopia"-the imaginary perfect society set in America and
based on what France might have become without the Revolution-of
Lezay-Marnesia's Lettres ecrites des rives de l'Ohio (1792); and
the political and nationalistic motivations behind Francois-Rene
Chateaubriand's idealization of America in Voyage en Amerique
(1827) and Memoires d'outre-tombe (1850), Hoffmann shows how the
authors' liberties with the truth helped create the idealized and
nostalgic representation of America that dominated the collective
European consciousness of their times. From a historical
perspective, Posthumous America works to determine when exactly
these writers stopped transcribing what they actually observed in
America and started giving imaginary accounts of their experiences.
A vital contribution to transatlantic studies, this detailed
exploration of French perspectives on the colonial era, the War of
Independence, and the birth of the American Republic sheds new
light on the French fascination with America. Posthumous America
will be invaluable for historians, political scientists, and
specialists of literature whose scholarship looks at America
through European eyes.
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