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"[A] rich, well-researched book . . . Here is laudable interdisciplinary work, of equal interest to students of history, literature, or architecture."—Choice
A rich analysis of how post Revolutionary Americans conceptualized the early Republic through metaphors of home building
In this interdisciplinary study, Faherty argues that throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Americans conceptualized their still unsettled political and social states through metaphors of home building. During this period, a pervasive concern with the design and furnishing of houses helped writers to manage previous encounters with settlements, both native and European, and to imagine and remodel a new national ideal. By aligning the period’s architectural concerns (registered in both the interior and exterior of houses) with concurrent debates about the need to create a national identity in the wake of the American Revolution, Faherty registers how representations of the house were a crucial locus for debating broadly shared concerns about the anxieties of nation building.
Topics include Abraham Lincoln’s use of architectural motifs in his 1858 senatorial campaign (the “house divided against itself ” speech); the arguments about domestic identity embodied in the designs of Mount Vernon and Monticello; the lingering import of colonial and indigenous settlements on post-revolutionary culture as registered in the work of William Bartram and Lewis and Clark; Charles Brockden Brown’s representations of the multivalent legacies of Pennsylvania’s architectural landscapes; Washington Irving’s attempts to preserve and remodel national architectural and literary practices by underscoring the manufactured nature of European cultural production; the shifting importance of the house and American attitudes toward nature in the work of three generations of the Cooper family; and the gendering of domestic space in the work of Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville.
Richly informed by contemporary work in literary studies, history, art history, and cultural criticism, Remodeling the Nation ranges incisively across the work of political theorists, social critics, novelists, poets, natural historians, landscape artists, travel writers, and authors of architectural and domestic treatises.
"Showing how views of domestic architecture reflect shifting conceptions of American identity, Faherty adds a fascinating chapter to American cultural and intellectual history. Expertly navigating between architecture,literature , and art, Faherty provides a broadly interdisciplinary study that illuminates each of these fields and creates a sweeping panorama of American culture."—David Reynolds, author of Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography, winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award; finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
“Remodeling the Nation asks big question and provides eye-opening answers. Duncan Faherty's ambitious book sheds new light on the formation of American identity between the Revolution and Civil War, and through his focus on architecture offers a way of reconceptualizing the period. This is essential reading for all students of post-Revolutionary and antebellum American culture.”—Louis P. Masur, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Institutions and Values, Trinity College
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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DUNCAN FAHERTY is Assistant Professor, Department of English, Queens College, City University of New York.
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