American Exceptionalisms: From Winthrop to Winfrey

Description

An incisive and wide ranging look at a powerful force and myth in American culture and history, American Exceptionalisms reveals the centuries-old persistence of the notion that the United States is an exceptional nation, in being both an example to the world and exempt from the rules of international law. Scholars from North America and Europe trace versions of the rhetoric of exceptionalism through a multitude of historical, cultural, and political phenomena, from John Winthrop's vision of the "cittie on a hill" and the Salem witch trials in the seventeenth century to The Blair Witch Project and Oprah Winfrey's "Child Predator Watch List" in the twenty-first century. The first set of essays focus on constitutive historical moments in the development of the myth, rom early exploration narratives through political debates in the early republic to twentieth-century immigration debates. The latter essays address the role of exceptionalism in the "war on terror" and such cornerstones of modern popular culture such as the horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft, the songs of Steve Earle, and the Oprah Winfrey show. Sylvia Soderlind is Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She is the author of Margin/Alias: Language and Colonization in Canadian and Quebecois Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991) and articles on American, Canadian and Quebecois fiction, "ghostmodernism" and translation, and the politics of metaphor published in, among others, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Ariel, Essays in Canadian Writing, Voix et images, RS/SI, New Feminism Review (Japan), ARTES (Sweden). James Taylor Carson is Professor of History and Associate Dean in the Faculty of Arts and Science at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. His scholarship focuses on the ethnohistory of native peoples in the American South, and he has published two books on the subject, Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999) and Making an Atlantic World: Circles, Paths, and Stories from the Colonial South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007). American Exceptionalisms Contents Illustrations Introduction:The Shining of America 1. Witch-hunting:American Exceptionalism and Global Terrorism 2. Both East and West:Asia and the Origins of American Exceptionalism 3. “The cause of America is ingreat measure the causeof all mankind”:American Universalism andExceptionalism in the Early Republic 4. Burlesquing America’s Errand:Savage Satire in Irving’s History of New Yorkand Melville’s The Confidence-Man 5. Exclusion Acts:How Popular Westerns Brokeredthe Atlantic Diaspora 6.America as “World-Salvation”:Josiah Strong, W. E. B. Du Bois, and theGlobal Rhetoric of American Exceptionalism 7. American Exceptionalism andImmigration Debates in theModern United States 8. Giving the People What They Want:The African American Exception asRacial Cliché in Percival Everett’s Erasure 9.“Just an American Boy”:American Exceptionalism and Steve Earleversus Capital Punishment 10. Oprah’s Vigilante Sentimentalism 11.The City under the Hill:Allegorical Tradition andH. P. Lovecraft’s America Afterword:American Exceptionalism inAmerican Intellectual Conversation,or How I Finally Submittedto Literary Criticism Notes on Contributors Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z