The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life

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University of Chicago Press, Aug 13, 1991 - Education - 269 pages
Examining the complex relationships between the political, popular, sexual, and textual interests of Nathaniel Hawthorne's work, Lauren Berlant argues that Hawthorne mounted a sophisticated challenge to America's collective fantasy of national unity. She shows how Hawthorne's idea of citizenship emerged from an attempt to adjudicate among the official and the popular, the national and the local, the collective and the individual, utopia and history.

At the core of Berlant's work is a three-part study of The Scarlet Letter, analyzing the modes and effects of national identity that characterize the narrator's representation of Puritan culture and his construction of the novel's political present tense. This analysis emerges from an introductory chapter on American citizenship in the 1850s and a following chapter on national fantasy, ranging from Hawthorne's early work "Alice Doane's Appeal" to the Statue of Liberty. In her conclusion, Berlant suggests that Hawthorne views everyday life and local political identities as alternate routes to the revitalization of the political and utopian promises of modern national life.
 

Contents

I am a citizen of somewhere else
1
Body Landscape and National Fantasy in Hawthornes Native Land
19
2 The Paradise of Law in The Scarlet Letter
57
Conscience Popular Memory and Narrative in The Scarlet Letter
97
4 The Nationalist Preface
161
5 America in Everyday Life
191
Notes
219
Index
261
Copyright

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About the author (1991)

Lauren Berlant (1957-2021) was the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. Her many books include Cruel Optimism and (with Kathleen Stewart) The Hundreds.