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 Crèvecœur and Claude-François de
Lezay-Marnésia, America was never more potent as a driving ideal
than in its loss. Examining the paradoxical American paradise
depicted in Crèvecœur’s Lettres d’un cultivateur américain
(1784); the “uchronotopia”—the imaginary perfect society set
in America and based on what France might have become without the
Revolution—of Lezay-Marnésia’s Lettres écrites des rives de
l’Ohio (1792); and the political and nationalistic motivations
behind François-René Chateaubriand’s idealization of America in
Voyage en Amérique (1827) and Mémoires 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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