Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction: (Interventions in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture)

About the Book

Hannah Lauren Murray shows that early US authors repeatedly imagined lost, challenged and negated White racial identity in the new nation. In a Critical Whiteness reading of canonical and lesser-known texts from Charles Brockden Brown to Frank J. Webb, Murray argues that White characters on the border between life and death were liminal presences that disturbed prescriptions of racial belonging in the early US. Fears of losing Whiteness were routinely channelled through the language of liminality, in a precursor to today's White anxieties of marginalisation and minoritisation.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements A Note on Language Introduction: Inexplicable Voices: Liminal Whiteness in the Early United States 1. ‘A shriek so terrible!’: Charles Brockden Brown’s Sensational Ventriloquists 2. ‘This is a story-telling age’: Spectral Nostalgia in Washington Irving’s Bracebridge Hall 3. ‘What had become of me?’: Sheppard Lee’s Blackface Transformation 4. ‘I say to you that I am dead!’: Edgar Allan Poe's Protesting Cadavers 5. ‘How can I speak to thee?’: Herman Melville’s Muted Voice 6. ‘I’m making a white man of him’: Making and Breaking Whiteness in The Garies and their Friends Coda: The Resurrection of Whiteness BibliographyIndex

About the Author :
Hannah Lauren Murray is Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Liverpool. Her research centres on race and citizenship in nineteenth-century American literature, with a specific focus on speculative genres. She has previously published in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (2020), The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown (Oxford UP, 2019) and the Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies (2017) and she sits on the steering committee for the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (BrANCA).

Review :
In a quick coda, Murry powerfully connects the dots to the United States today, showing how fears of white marginality continue fueling the powerfully exclusionary logics of whiteness. This is a book that is generous to its predecessors across an array of fields, and that gives new liveliness and relevance to familiar debates about the destructive innovation of white citizenship in the newly United States. In a quick coda, Murry powerfully connects the dots to the United States today, showing how fears of white marginality continue fueling the powerfully exclusionary logics of whiteness. This is a book that is generous to its predecessors across an array of fields, and that gives new liveliness and relevance to familiar debates about the destructive innovation of white citizenship in the newly United States. As scholars of American literature and history know, White dread has been a haunting presence for a long, long time. Anxious fantasies of replacement, subsumption, diminution: in Liminal Whiteness, Hannah Murray raises these spirits, and gets them to speak in new tongues. Across agile readings of figures from Brockden Brown, Poe and Melville to Robert Montgomery Bird and Frank Webb, Liminal Whiteness vivifies a rich literary counter-history and gives us new purchase on the shifting terrain of reactive White fantasy.