Download or read book Immigration, Ethnicity, and Class in American Writing, 1830–1860 written by Leonardo Buonomo and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013-12-04 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the close relationship between the portrayal of foreigners and the delineation of culture and identity in antebellum American writing. Both literary and historical in its approach, this study shows how, in a period marked by extensive immigration, heated debates on national and racial traits, during a flowering in American letters, encouraged responses from American authors to outsiders that not only contain precious insights into nineteenth-century America’s self-construction but also serve to illuminate our own time’s multicultural societies. The authors under consideration are alternately canonical (Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville), recently rediscovered (Kirkland), or simply neglected (Arthur). The texts analyzed cover such different genres as diaries, letters, newspapers, manuals, novels, stories, and poems.