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- Title
'The Man Without a Country' and America's Post-war Crisis of National Belonging.
- Authors
Gibian, Peter
- Abstract
Hale's 'The Man Without a Country' turns on itself: The Man without a Country emerges not as the story's one-dimensional villain but as its complex hero-a new sort of cosmopolitan patriot. With its powerful evocation of sentimental attachment to the figure of the American expatriate voyager, Hale's tale reflects the author's struggle to re-assert the sentimental power of an imagined community in the new context of a wide-ranging global existence. Hale may have begun writing in response to the crisis of national belonging triggered by the Civil War, hoping that this piece of invented folklore would reinforce or restore an older mode of bounded American national self-definition, but 'The Man without a Country' in fact anticipates the outline of an alternative vision and stance reflecting the new international situation emerging over the course of the 19th-century-giving us a prescient portrait of an American identity that finds itself most fully in trans-national situations.
- Subjects
UNITED States; MAN Without a Country, The (Short story : Hale); HALE, Edward Everett, 1822-1909; SOCIAL belonging; AMERICAN national character in literature; NONCITIZENS in literature
- Publication
Canadian Review of American Studies, 2012, Vol 42, Issue 1, p36
- ISSN
0007-7720
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.3138/cras.42.1.36