Sons and Daughters of Self-Made Men: Improvising Gender, Place, Nation in American Literature (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781611483444)

At a moment in which America seems simultaneously more closed and more open to change than ever before, Sons and Daughters of Self-Made Men: Improvising Gender, Place, Nation in American Literature re-examines a defining national discourse. Exploring the dilemmas of U.S. subjects positioned as inheritors-and thus as children-of the archetypal self-made Founder/Father, the author offers a critical re-evaluation of the trope of self-making as it is expressed in modern and contemporary American literature. She views "self-making" as a mode of simultaneous constriction and possibility, where the compulsion to perform to the national script leads to critical and creative forms of improvisation. In texts by Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Sandra Cisneros, John Edgar Wideman, and others, she finds self-making re-articulated with improvisational differences that suggest possibilities for an improvisational nation.

Author: Mary Paniccia Carden
ISBN-10: 1611483441
ISBN-13: 9781611483444
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Language: English
Published: 12/01/2009
Pages: 255
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.10w x 0.90d