Assesses the attitudes toward America held by writers since the time of James Fenimore Cooper who have left the country to live in Europe.

Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: Paris has traditionally called to the American heart, beginning with the arrival of Benjamin Franklin in 1776 in an effort to win the support of France for the colonies War of Independence. Franklin would remain in Paris for nine years, returning to Philadelphia in 1785. Then, in the first great period of American literature before 1860, literary pioneers such as Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne were all to spend time in the French capital. Henry James, toward the close of the nineteenth century, was the first to create the image of a talented literary artist who was ready to foreswear his citizenship. From his adopted home in England he traveled widely through Italy and France, living in Paris for two years. There he became close friends with another literary expatriate, Edith Wharton, who made Paris her permanent home. Between them they gave the term expatriate a high literary polish at the turn of the century, and their prestige was undeniable. They were the in cosmopolitans, sought out by traveling Americans, commented on in the press, the favored guests of scholars, as well as men and women of affairs. This thesis investigates the mass expatriation of Americans to Paris during the 1920s, and then focuses on selected works by two of the expatriates: Ernest Hemingway s The Sun Also Rises (1926) and F. Scott Fitzgerald s The Great Gatsby (1925). The specific emphasis is on disillusionment with the American lifestyle as reflected in these novels. The two books have been chosen because both are prominent examples of the literary criticism that Americans were directing at their homeland from abroad throughout the twenties. In a first step, necessary historical background regarding the nature of the American lifestyle is provided in chapter two. This information is included in order to facilitate a better understanding of what Hemingway and Fitzgerald were actually disillusioned with. Furthermore, that lifestyle was a primary motivating factor behind the expatriation of many United States citizens. Attention is given to the extraordinary nature of the American migration to Paris in the twenties, as the sheer volume of exiles set it apart from any expatriation movement before or since in American history. Moreover, a vast majority of the participants were writers, artists, or intellectuals, a fact which suggests the United States during [...]

These essays explore the impartial critical outlook American writers acquired through their experiences in Europe since 1850. Collectively, contributors reveal how the American writer's intuitive sense of freedom, coupled with their feeling of liberation from European influences, led to intellectual independence in the literary works they produced.

This book examines the distinction between literary expatriation and exile through a 'contrapuntal reading' of modern Palestinian and American writing. It argues that exile, in the Palestinian case especially, is a political catastrophe; it is banishment by a colonial power. It suggests that, unlike expatriation (a choice of a foreign land over one’s own), exile is a political rather than an artistic concept and is forced rather than voluntary — while exile can be emancipatory, it is always an unwelcome loss. In addition to its historical dimension, exile also entails a different perception of return to expatriation. This book frames expatriates as quintessentially American, particularly intellectuals and artists seeking a space of creativity and social dissidence in the experience of living away from home. At the heart of both literary discourses, however, is a preoccupation with home, belonging, identity, language, mobility and homecoming.

Today more than ever, large numbers of Americans are leaving the United States. It is estimated that by the end of the decade, some 10 million of the brightest and most talented Americans, representing an estimated $136 billion in wages, will be living and working overseas. This emigration trend contradicts the internalized myth of America as the land of affluence, opportunity, and freedom. What is behind this trend? Wennersten argues that many people these days, from college students to retirees, are uncertain or ambivalent about what it means to be an American. For example, many are uncomfortable with that they believe America has come to represent to the rest of the world. At the same time, globalization and advances in technology have enabled the growth of a telecommuting work force whose members can live in one country and work in another, and this trend, among other factors, has encouraged a new generation of people to respond to the pull of global citizenship. Leaving America is an important reexamination of one of the most central stories in the history of American culture—the story of the immigrant coming to the Promised Land. While millions still come to America and millions more still wish to do so, there is an important counterflow of emigration from America to distant parts of the planet. This book focuses on modern American expatriates as a significant and heretofore largely ignored counterpoint phenomenon every bit as central to understanding modern America as is the image of a nation of immigrants. The greatest irony in America today may well be that while argument and discord prevail in the edifice of American democracy about diversity, economic justice, equality, and the Iraq War, many of the most thoughtful citizens have already left the building.

This study develops the important work carried out on American literature through the frameworks of transnational, transatlantic, and trans-local studies to ask what happens when these same aspects become intrinsic to the critical narrative. Much cultural criticism since the 1990s has sought to displace perceptions of American exceptionalism with broader notions of Atlanticism, transnationalism, world-system, and trans-localism as each has redefined the US and the world more generally. This collection shows how the remapping of America in terms of global networks, and as a set of particular localities, or even glocalities, now plays out in Americanist scholarship, reflecting on the critical consequences of the spatial turn in American literary and cultural studies. Spanning twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry, fiction, memoir, visual art, publishing, and television, and locating the US in Caribbean, African, Asian, European, and other contexts, this volume argues for a re-modelling of American-ness with the transnational as part of its innate rhetoric. It includes discussions of travel, migration, disease, media, globalization, and countless other examples of inflowing. Essays focus on subjects tracing the contemporary contours of the transnational, such as the role of the US in the rise of the global novel, the impact of Caribbean history on American thought (and vice versa), transatlantic cultural and philosophical genealogies and correspondences, and the exchanges between the poetics of American space and those of other world spaces. Asking questions about the way the American eye has traversed and consumed the objects and cultures of the world, but how that world is resistant, this volume will make an important contribution to American and Transatlantic literary studies.

First Published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

“Cooper paints a meticulous and absorbing portrait of McKay’s restless artistic, intellectual, and political odyssey... The definitive biography on McKay.”—Choice Although recognized today as one of the genuine pioneers of black literature in this century—the author of “If We Must Die,” Home to Harlem, Banana Bottom, and A Long Way from Home, among other works—Claude McKay (1890–1948) died penniless and almost forgotten in a Chicago hospital. In this masterly study, Wayne Cooper presents a fascinating, detailed account of McKay’s complex, chaotic, and frequently contradictory life. In his poetry and fiction, as well as in his political and social commentaries, McKay searched for a solid foundation for a valid black identity among the working-class cultures of the West Indies and the United States. He was an undeniably important predecessor to such younger writers of the Harlem Renaissance as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, and also to influential West Indian and African writers such as C. L. R. James and Aimé Césaire. Knowledge of his life adds important dimensions to our understanding of American radicalism, the expatriates of the 1920s, and American literature. “Mr. Cooper’s most original contribution is his careful and perceptive analysis of McKay’s nonfiction writing, especially his social and political commentary, which often contained ‘prophetic statements‘ on a range of important social, political, and historical issues.”—New York Times Book Review

This unique interdisciplinary essay collection offers a fresh perspective on the active involvement of American women authors in the nineteenth-century transatlantic world. Internationally diverse contributors explore topics ranging from women's social and political mobility to their authorship and activism. While a number of essays focus on such well-known writers as Margaret Fuller, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, other, perhaps lesser-known authors are also included, such as E. D. E. N. Southworth, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Elizabeth Peabody, Jeannette Hart, and Laura Richards. These essays show the spectrum of interests and activities in which nineteenth-century women were involved as they moved, geographically and metaphorically, toward gaining their independence and the right to control their lives. Traveling far and wide - to Italy, France, Great Britain, and the Bahamas - these writers came into contact with realities far different from their own. On topics ranging from homeopathy and literary endeavors to politics and revolution, they conversed with others, reaching and inspiring transnational audiences with their words and deeds, and creating a space for self-expression in the rapidly changing transatlantic world.

Transnationalism means many things to many people, from crossing physical borders to crossing intellectual ones. The Limits of Transnationalism reassesses the overly optimistic narratives often associated with this malleable term, revealing both the metaphorical and very real obstacles for transnational mobility. Nancy L. Green begins her wide-ranging examination with the story of Frank Gueydan, an early twentieth-century American convicted of manufacturing fake wine in France who complained bitterly that he was neither able to get a fair trial there nor to enlist the help of US officials. Gueydan’s predicament opens the door for a series of inquiries into the past twenty-five years of transnational scholarship, raising questions about the weaknesses of global networks and the slippery nature of citizenship ties for those who try to live transnational lives. The Limits of Transnationalism serves as a cogent reminder of this topic’s complexity, calling for greater attention to be paid to the many bumps in the road.