Rereading the Revolution: The Turn-of-the-Century American Revolutionary War Novel - Softcover

Lawson, Anita

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0879728183 ISBN 13: 9780879728182

Publisher: Popular Press 1, 2000

Synopsis

Approximately fifty historical novels dealing with the American Revolution were published in the United States from 1896 to 1906. Benjamin S. Lawson critically examines the narrative strategies employed in these works and the ways in which fiction is made to serve the purpose of vivifying national history.
    Writing within the conventions of the historical romance, these authors created plots that  reflect the enveloping concerns of the War for Independence, such as the young American woman who often must choose between suitors on opposite sides in the wider conflict.
    Lawson concludes that these works reassured readers of the worth of an Anglo-American heritage. They were escapist fantasies to the degree that they failed to confront contemporary realities of crisis and change: the New Immigration, urbanization and industrialization, labor strife, the plight of the poor, and agitation on behalf of women and ethnic minorities.

About this title

About the Author:

Originally a Midwesterner, Benjamin S. Lawson holds academic degrees from Purdue, Indiana, and Bowling Green State universities. His teaching career, however, has been spent largely in the South at Albany State University in Georgia, where he specializes in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American literature. Interdisciplinary and cross-cultural contexts of literature have particularly interested him. He has received a number of National Endowment for the Humanities grants for summer study and been a participant at the School of Criticism and Theory. His international experience includes a Fulbright Commission-sponsored term lecturing at the University of Helsinki along with semesters by invitation at Helsinki and at University College London. More recently, he has served as the Walt Whitman Chair of American Literature at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.

About this edition

• Publisher: Popular Press 1
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0879728183
• ISBN 13: 9780879728182
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 248