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States Of Insurgency: Dismemberment And Citizenship In The American 1848, David J. Drysdale

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

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In this dissertation, I examine how the antipodal forces of insurgency and counterinsurgency are crucial to the articulation of citizenship and identity in antebellum American literature. I suggest that a coherent, self-contained American identity was maintained through acts of physical and discursive dismemberment that disciplined insurgent expressions of democracy and idealized in their stead an enervated, acquiescent body politic. My dissertation traces how a series of American writers confront the dynamic of insurgency and counterinsurgency in an effort to reconcile the nation’s revolutionary origin with its colonialist practices. I …