• Preface


• Acknowledgements


• Introduction: The Strangeness of American Nationhood


• Chapter 1: Refiguring the Foreign: Irving, Poe, and America's "Europe"


• Chapter 2: Writing Against the Nation: Cooper's Gleanings


• Chapter 3: Patriotic Anti-Nationalism: Minority Reports from Abroad


• Chapter 4: Cleansing Actions: Rewriting the Border Wars


• Chapter 5: Removal and Remorse in Jacksonian America


• Chapter 6: National Awakening: Reconstructing the Revolution


• Chapter 7: America Against Itself: The South, Slavery, and Dissociative National Identities


• Chapter 8: The Cartography of Destiny and the Savage West


• Chapter 9: The Interpreter of National Maladies: Poe's American Turn


• Bibliography

J. Gerald Kennedy is Boyd Professor of English at Louisiana State University. He is the author of numerous publications, including Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity, and the co-editor of Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race.

Examining work by Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine M. Sedgwick, William Gilmore Simms, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Lydia Maria Child, Strange Nation investigates America's often vexed relationships with the practice of literary nationalism.