Yankee Yarns
Storytelling and the Invention of the National Body in Nineteenth-Century American Culture
- Yankee Yarns provides the first systematic study of the Yankee’s formation in 19th century US culture
- Critiques US national historiographies by revealing an indulgence in storytelling, fraudulence, and self-irony at the heart of the US national character
- Argues that US national culture is originally transnational and transatlantic
In this book, Stefanie Schäfer provides the first study of the Yankee’s many facets. Reading together Yankee Doodle, Brother Jonathan, Uncle Sam, the Yankee Peddler and the Down Easter, she highlights the Yankee’s ambiguity: His performance hinges on storytelling and fraudulence. An invention of transatlantic origin, the Yankee straddles regional and sectional, rural and urban, working class and bourgeois US identities. For nineteenth-century audiences at home and abroad, he becomes the hegemonic embodiment of US national character, its political and material culture and the homespun agent of its imperial fantasies.
Introduction
1. John Bull and Brother Jonathan, a Transatlantic Affair
2. Theater of/for the Nation: The Stage Yankee as Metatheatric Sign
3. The Yankee Peddler Conjures an American Marketplace
4. New England’s "Homespun Yankee" in the Cultural and Literary Imagination
5. Yankee Politics: A Coda
Bibliography
Appendices
[...] wide-ranging, richly researched, and carefully analytical.
Bridging literary and cultural studies, Stefanie Schäfer considers the Yankee in various guises: as national representative, stage performer, wily businessman, and regional personality. With lively visual examples and rich archival materials, Yankee Yarns interrogates gendered and racialized notions of U.S. identity and offers fresh, valuable insights on the transatlantic creation of American character.
