| This dissertation argues that the dream of a national literature has had no more powerful corroborative vehicle in America than the language of race. Looking first at texts by Franklin and Jefferson, and turning then to the seminal works of Poe, Melville, Whitman, and finally John Ashbery, I show how the effort to forge a set of distinctively American expressive forms intersects, often uncomfortably, with the antebellum vision of an America held together by the special ties of whiteness. What my very different canonical sources share, I suggest, is an impulse to describe nationality not in terms of the state and its institutions, but as a kind of affective relation, potent enough to transpire even between strangers. The language of race enables that nationalist vision, I argue, by giving name and place to a quality of attachment--of intimacy--between a dispersed and anonymous citizenry. I suggest, however, that the nationalist reduction of American-ness to whiteness presents a variety of problems to authors who had been used to understanding their social identities in terms much more expansive. In chapters concerned with pedophilia in Poe, the tantalizingly oblique sodomitical figures of Moby-Dick, and Whitman's passionate embrace of the stranger/reader, I show how alternative models of intimacy and attachment were used to ratify, to qualify, and sometimes to contest an exclusionary nationalist racialism. My reading of the American Renaissance thus situates the whiteness and maleness of many of its authors within the broader context of American nationalism, and suggests that we might enlarge our perspectives on "the social construction of race" by recalling that, for mid-century authors, race describes not only identity, but a way of being attached--to the past, to a community of strangers, to the nation. |
