{"product_id":"american-claimants-sarah-meer-9780198812517","title":"American Claimants: The Transatlantic Romance, C. 1820-1920","description":"This book recovers a major nineteenth-century literary figure, the American Claimant. For over a century, claimants offered a compelling way to understand cultural difference across the Anglophone Atlantic, especially between Britain and the United States. They also formed a political talisman, invoked against slavery and segregation, or privileges of gender and class. Later, claimants were exported to South Africa, becoming the fictional form for explaining black students who acquired American degrees. American Claimants traces the figure back to lost-heir romance, and explores its uses. These encompassed real, imagined, and textual ideas of inheritance, for writers and editors, and also for missionaries, artists, and students. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThe claimant dramatized tensions between tradition and change, or questions of exclusion and power: it offered ways of seeing activism, education, sculpture, and dress. The premise for dozens of novels and plays, a trope, a joke, even the basis for real claims: claimants matter in theatre history and periodical studies, they touch on literary marketing and reprinting, and they illuminate some unexpected texts. These range from \u003cem\u003eOur American Cousin \u003c\/em\u003eto \u003cem\u003eBleak House\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eLittle Lord Fauntleroy \u003c\/em\u003eto \u003cem\u003eFrederick Douglass' Paper;\u003c\/em\u003e writers discussed include Frances Trollope, Julia Griffiths, Alexander Crummell, John Dube, James McCune Smith, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain. The focus on claimants yields remarkable finds: new faces, fresh angles, a lost column, and a forgotten theatrical genre. It reveals the pervasiveness of this form, and its centrality in imagining cultural contact and exchange.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Sarah Meer\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 0198812515\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780198812517\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Oxford University Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 07\/15\/2020\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 288\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Hardcover\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 1.41lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 9.30h x 6.20w x 0.90d","brand":"Sarah Meer","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":47424983007487,"sku":"9780198812517","price":120.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_96caa561-fd2b-4395-9813-9205ea03a0c9.jpg?v=1761536193","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/american-claimants-sarah-meer-9780198812517","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}