Attachment, Place, and Otherness in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

This study examines the role interpersonal and place attachments play in crafting a national identity in American literature. Building on ecocritical and psychoanalytic studies, it integrates the language of empirical science and the physical realities of place, investigating non-human agency and that which exists beyond the material realm. It considers how writers in the early republic constructed modernity by restructuring representations of attachments, which are reimagined, reconfigured, or rejected by writers in the long 19th century. American perceptions of Otherness are pathologized as a result of insecure attachments, resulting in a restructuring of antiquated notions of difference.

Jillmarie Murphy is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program at Union College, Schenectady, NY. She has published books, journal articles, and essays that focus on Puritan poetics, literature of the early American Republic, prominent and lesser-known antebellum literary figures, and transatlantic novelists who span the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her publications generally employ the psycho-social paradigm of attachment theory, drawing on topics considering parenting, gender, race, class, and ethnicity, as well as publications that consider the evolution of literary history and how certain authors and texts resonate long after their heyday.

Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1. Dispossession, Diseased Attachments, and the Transmogrifying Self in Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn Chapter 2. Fugitivity and Displaced Bodies in Leonora Sansay's Secret History; or, the Horrors of Saint Domingo Chapter 3. George Lippard's Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall and the Transformational Place of Mid-Nineteenth Century Urban Fiction Chapter 4. Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes, and the Precarity of Place in Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Frank Norris's McTeague Chapter 5. African-American Place Attachments and the Chains of Modernity in Paul Laurence Dunbar's Sport of the Gods Index