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The national uncanny Indian ghosts and American subjects / Renée L. Bergland.

By: Material type: TextTextSeries: Publication details: Hanover, NH : Dartmouth College : 2000.; University Press of New England, (c)2000.Description: 1 online resource (199 pages)Content type:
  • text
Media type:
  • computer
  • computer
Carrier type:
  • online resource
  • online resource
ISBN:
  • 9781611688719
Subject(s): Genre/Form: LOC classification:
  • PS173 .N385 2000
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
Contents:
1. Indian ghosts and American subjects -- part 1. Possession and dispossession -- 2. Summoning the invisible world: from the Jeremiad to the Phantasmagoria -- 3. The haunted American enlightenment -- 4. "The diseased state of the public mind": Brown, Irving, and Woodworth -- pt. 2. Erotic politics -- 5. Contesting the frontier romance: Child and Cooper -- 6. The phantom lovers of Hobomok -- 7. Cooper's gaze -- pt. 3. Race, history, nation -- 8. William Apess and Nathaniel Hawthorne -- 9. William Apess's "Tale of blood" -- 10. Haunted Hawthorne -- 11. Conclusion.
Action note:
  • digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve
Subject: Although spectral Indians appear with startling frequency in US literary works, until now the implications of describing them as ghosts have not been thoroughly investigated. In the first years of nationhood, Philip Freneau and Sarah Wentworth Morton peopled their works with Indian phantoms, as did Charles Brocken Brown, Washington Irving, Samuel Woodworth, Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, William Apess, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others who followed. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Native American ghosts figured prominently in speeches attributed to Chief Seattle, Black Elk, and Kicking Bear. Today, Stephen King and Leslie Marmon Silko plot best-selling novels around ghostly Indians and haunted Indian burial grounds. Renée L. Bergland argues that representing Indians as ghosts internalizes them as ghostly figures within the white imagination. Spectralization allows white Americans to construct a concept of American nationhood haunted by Native Americans, in which Indians become sharers in an idealized national imagination. However, the problems of spectralization are clear, since the discourse questions the very nationalism it constructs. Indians who are transformed into ghosts cannot be buried or evaded, and the specter of their forced disappearance haunts the American imagination. Indian ghosts personify national guilt and horror, as well as national pride and pleasure. Bergland tells the story of a terrifying and triumphant American aesthetic that repeatedly transforms horror into glory, national dishonor into national pride.
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Includes bibliographies and index.

Acknowledgments -- 1. Indian ghosts and American subjects -- part 1. Possession and dispossession -- 2. Summoning the invisible world: from the Jeremiad to the Phantasmagoria -- 3. The haunted American enlightenment -- 4. "The diseased state of the public mind": Brown, Irving, and Woodworth -- pt. 2. Erotic politics -- 5. Contesting the frontier romance: Child and Cooper -- 6. The phantom lovers of Hobomok -- 7. Cooper's gaze -- pt. 3. Race, history, nation -- 8. William Apess and Nathaniel Hawthorne -- 9. William Apess's "Tale of blood" -- 10. Haunted Hawthorne -- 11. Conclusion.

Although spectral Indians appear with startling frequency in US literary works, until now the implications of describing them as ghosts have not been thoroughly investigated. In the first years of nationhood, Philip Freneau and Sarah Wentworth Morton peopled their works with Indian phantoms, as did Charles Brocken Brown, Washington Irving, Samuel Woodworth, Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, William Apess, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others who followed. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Native American ghosts figured prominently in speeches attributed to Chief Seattle, Black Elk, and Kicking Bear. Today, Stephen King and Leslie Marmon Silko plot best-selling novels around ghostly Indians and haunted Indian burial grounds. Renée L. Bergland argues that representing Indians as ghosts internalizes them as ghostly figures within the white imagination. Spectralization allows white Americans to construct a concept of American nationhood haunted by Native Americans, in which Indians become sharers in an idealized national imagination. However, the problems of spectralization are clear, since the discourse questions the very nationalism it constructs. Indians who are transformed into ghosts cannot be buried or evaded, and the specter of their forced disappearance haunts the American imagination. Indian ghosts personify national guilt and horror, as well as national pride and pleasure. Bergland tells the story of a terrifying and triumphant American aesthetic that repeatedly transforms horror into glory, national dishonor into national pride.

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