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  1. Home
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  3. Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature
  • Cited by 40
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
September 2009
Print publication year:
2002
Online ISBN:
9780511485473
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511485473
Series:
Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (128)
Subjects:
Literature, Area Studies, American Literature, American Studies, Literary Theory, History, History of Ideas and Intellectual History
Information

Book description

In this broad ranging and powerful study, Gregg Crane examines the interaction between civic identity, race and justice in American law and literature. Crane recounts the efforts of literary and legal figures to bring the nation's law into line with the moral consensus that slavery and racial oppression were evil. By documenting an actual historical interaction central both to American literature and American constitutional law, Crane reveals the influence of literature on the constitutional discourse of citizenship. Covering such writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass, and a whole range of novelists, poets, philosophers, politicians, lawyers and judges, this is a remarkable book, that will revise the relationship between race and nationalism in American literature.

Reviews

‘A profound and moving book that deserves a wide audience. Crane displays a searching wisdom and precise imagination in brilliantly describing the moral universe where literature and law meet in key texts of the nineteenth century. An indispensable study of nationalism and race and their impact on American law and literature.’

Eric Sundquist

‘An ambitious, brilliant, study of American literary and legal texts from the late eighteenth into the twentieth century. This profoundly interdisciplinary study of law and literature, written by someone who has clearly mastered both disciplines, is also a major contribution to African American literary and cultural studies.’

Robert Levine

‘This book will force scholars in the field to revise their understanding of the political heritage of the Emersonian tradition.’

Brook Thomas

Gregg D. Crane wins his laurels for a detailed and well-reasoned work of extraordinary intensity …'.

Source: American Studies

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