Liminal Whiteness in Early Us Fiction

‘As scholars of American literature and history know, White dread has been a haunting presence for a long, long time. Anxious fantasies of replacement, subsumption, diminution: in Liminal Whiteness, Hannah Murray raises these spirits, and gets them to speak in new tongues. Across agile readings of figures from Brocken Brown, Poe, and Melville to Robert Montgomery Bird and Frank Webb, Liminal Whiteness vivifies a rich literary counter-history and gives us new purchase on the shifting terrain of reactive White fantasy.‘ Peter Coviello, University of Illinois Chicago An in-depth examination of liminality and race in early US fiction Hannah Lauren Murray shows that early US authors repeatedly imagined lost, challenged and negated White racial identity in the new nation. In a Critical Whiteness reading of canonical and lesser-known texts from Charles Brockden Brown to Frank J. Webb, Murray argues that White characters on the border between life and death were liminal presences that disturbed prescriptions of racial belonging in the early US. Fears of losing Whiteness were routinely channelled through the language of liminality, in a precursor to today‘s White anxieties of marginalisation and minoritisation. Hannah Lauren Murray is Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Liverpool. Cover image: The Library Company of Philadelphia Cover : [EUP logo] edinburghuniversitypress.com ISBN Barcode