Compte-rendu : New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, 472 pages.International audienc

Reynes, Anne

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J. Gerald Kennedy, Strange Nation: Literary
Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe
Anne Reynes
To cite this version:
Anne Reynes. J. Gerald Kennedy, Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the
Age of Poe . IdeAs : idées d’Amérique, Institut des Amériques (France), 2018, Modernités dans les
Amériques : des avant-gardes à aujourd’hui. ￿hal-01846025￿
 
IdeAs
Idées d'Amériques 
11 | Printemps/Été 2018
Modernités dans les Amériques : des avant-gardes à
aujourd’hui
J. Gerald Kennedy, Strange Nation: Literary
Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe
New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, 472 pages
Anne Reynes
Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ideas/2935
ISSN: 1950-5701
Publisher
Institut des Amériques
 
Electronic reference
Anne Reynes, « J. Gerald Kennedy, Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of
Poe », IdeAs [Online], 11 | Printemps/Été 2018, Online since 20 June 2018, connection on 24 June
2018. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ideas/2935 
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J. Gerald Kennedy, Strange Nation:
Literary Nationalism and Cultural
Conflict in the Age of Poe
New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, 472 pages
Anne Reynes
REFERENCES
J. Gerald Kennedy, Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, 472 pages
1 Gerald Kennedy’s book aims at bringing into view “the deformities that American literary
nationalism tried to conceal” by “deconstructing the strangeness of nationalism itself and
US cultural nation-building” (4, 11). By focusing on the period between the two great
compromises  of  1820  and  1850,  the  author  illuminates  the  growing  gap  between
nationalist illusions and sociohistorical realities. His juxtaposition of texts by little-known
authors with writings of major writers, and his use of a wide range of genres—including
speeches, songs, travel narratives, fables, romances, short stories, and novels—allow the
reader to understand that the uncertainty of national identity pervaded every level of
print  culture  during  these  violent,  formative  decades.  The  technique  of  including
narratives by those excluded from full citizenship also provides salient insights into the
disparity between national imaginings. 
2 Kennedy’s  carefully  argued  study  of  these  incongruous  conceptions  of  American
nationhood is organized in nine chapters falling into three topically-arranged units. A
third of the book concentrates on the reassessment of Euro-American cultural identity;
the middle  third investigates  responses  to  the American past  (relations  with Native-
Americans;  the  Revolution);  and  the  final  third  presents  alternate  versions  of  the
American  future  (slavery  crisis  in  the  South;  westward  expansion).  The  last  chapter
establishes Poe’s tales of death and decay as an example of a form of writing that queers
J. Gerald Kennedy, Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict...
IdeAs, 11 | Printemps/Été 2018
1
the  fantasies  of  the  nation’s  exceptionalism  to  reveal  frightening  violence  and
unacknowledged angst. All nine chapters are tied together by short concluding sections
that recapitulate their introductions and arguments, and point to next chapters.
3 The introductory section of the book engages with a general definition of nation and
nationalism as cultural blind spot and the “site of implicit conflict” (Gellner, Balibar),
before  exposing  the  incongruous  nature  of  US  nationhood  as  rooted  in  the  radical
incompatibility  of  civic  and ethnic  nationalism before—and since—the Declaration of
Independence. This inherent contradiction, Kennedy argues, explains the ever-increasing
“strangeness” of the stories of American life and history penned by writers engaged in
the conflicted enterprise of inventing national culture and tradition in the antebellum
era. 
4 Although  the  term “strange”  is  never  strictly  defined,  it  is  related  to  “the  broil  of
suspicion, hostility, and disunity” (242) expressed in the counter-narratives that expose
“the weird operations at work behind the facade of American nation-making” (35). While
some of these texts, such as William Apes’s A Son of the Forest (1829) or William Wells
Brown’s  The  American  Fugitive  in  Europe (1855)  are  unambiguous  denunciations  of
nationalistic delusions, others, such as Irving’s Astoria (1836) or Margaret Fuller’s Summer
on the Lake (1844), are fraught with contradictions and misgivings. Moreover, Kennedy’s
method of reading classic works alongside lesser-known texts provides the reader an
opportunity  to  assess  a  writer’s  evolving  views.  For  instance,  the  chapter  entitled
“Rewriting  the  Border  Wars”  brings  into  comparative  juxtaposition  Cooper’s  first
volumes of  the Leatherstocking Tales  with Lydia Maria Child’s  Hobomok (1824)  and a
seldom cited counter national narrative by John Dunn Hunter, Memoirs of Captivity Among
the  Indians  of  North  America (1823).  The  procedure  helps  Kennedy  to  demonstrate
convincingly  that  reading  the  ending  of  The  Last  of  the  Mohicans  as  Whitmanesque
adhesiveness does not do justice to Cooper’s subtler implication that “the dilemma of
national identity inheres in the contradictions of its own indeterminacy” (160).
5 The strength of Kennedy’s demonstration lies in his choice of a critical historicism which
uncovers the deformities of American nationalism by focusing on the interplay between
near and far at work in texts pondering the ambiguities of American identity in the post-
Revolutionary era. In the first three chapters of the book, which examine the European
roots of  US national  cultural  identity,  this approach serves to highlight a number of
critical  responses  from  such  writers  as  Poe,  Irving,  Cooper,  Catherine  M.  Sedgwick,
Margaret Fuller, and William Wells Brown. Kennedy’s elegant analyses reveal tensions
between  local  and  national  (as  in  Irving’s  “Legend  of  Sleepy  Hollow”  and  “Rip  Van
Winckle”),  forms  of  “patriotic  antinationalism”  (Fuller,  Brown),  or  alternative
conceptions of nationalism (Cooper’s Gleanings in Europe). In chapter 6, which focuses on
literary depictions of the Revolution, the author interprets antiwar reflections in William
Gilmore  Simms’s  novel  The  Partisan:  a  Tale  of  the  Revolution (1835)  as  a  response  to
Jacksonian expansionist politics. Close inspection of Simms’s oblique, abstract language
reveals  that  his  partisan tale  is  undermined by  deep apprehensions  about  American
colonizing  greed,  which  may  signal  the  manifestation  of  the  “political  unconscious”
(Jameson). Kennedy’s attention to the reconfiguration of the premises of nationalism in
relation  to  a  wider  scale  demonstrates  that  (to  borrow  Paul  Giles’s  formulation)
“antebellum American authors do not so much ground their work upon native soil as
situate  it  on  highly  charged  and  fraught  boundary  between  past  and  present,
J. Gerald Kennedy, Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict...
IdeAs, 11 | Printemps/Été 2018
2
circumference and displacement,  and the challenge each individual  writer faces is  in
mapping out a discrete location, in finding a space from which to speak” (Giles, 107).
6 The last, and particularly strong, chapter of the book focuses on Poe’s turn to American
subjects  (after  1842)  to  cast  a  sinister  reflection  on  Polk’s  rhetoric  of  national
expansionism. A Poe scholar, Kennedy compellingly argues that Poe’s “necro citizenship”
(Castronovo) in “Some Words with a Mummy”, “The Oblong Box” or “Facts in the Case of
Mr. Valdemar” counters the myth of American progress. The analysis of “Melonta Tauta”
returns to the theme of the unbuilt monument to Washington in the introduction where
Poe’s tale is placed in conversation with two other vignettes of Apocalypse—a story by
George Lippard and an oration by Robert C. Winthrop— to figure the Union’s ineluctable
collapse. Poe’s notorious exclusion from F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941)
emphasized the marginality of  his  position in US cultural  life.  Conversely,  Kennedy’s
deliberate choice not to include any of Matthiessen’s representative American writers
and focus instead on less-discussed narratives is a way to stress the contingence and
conflicted formation of American nationalism. 
7 Strange  Nation offers  a  rewarding  and  engaging  study  of  the  representation  of  “the
cultural  conflicts  emanating  from  racism,  religious  bigotry,  sexism,  slavery,  Indian
removal,  nativism,  sectionalism,  and  many  other  antebellum controversies”  (x).  The
inclusion of  a variety of  documents of  nineteenth-century popular print culture,  and
blend of  detailed interpretations and broader historical  contextualization make it  an
important book for both specialist  and non-specialist  readers.  By rooting the strange
contradictions  of  US  nationhood  in  the  ambiguous  semantic  mappings  of  “We  the
People”, Kennedy offers a comment on America that seems as pertinent today as it was in
the age of Poe.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
GILES, Paul. The Global Remapping of American Literature. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2010.
AUTHORS
ANNE REYNES
Maître de conférence à l’Université d’Aix Marseille, LERMA, Aix-en-Provence, France
J. Gerald Kennedy, Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict...
IdeAs, 11 | Printemps/Été 2018
3


J. Gerald Kennedy, Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe

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J. Gerald Kennedy, Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe

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