National Imaginaries, American Identities: The Cultural Work of American Iconography

Published by Princeton University Press 2001

National Imaginaries, American Identities

The Cultural Work of American Iconography

Edited by: Larry J. Reynolds and Gordon Hutner

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691227726

Overview
Contents

About this book

From the American Revolution to the present, the United States has enjoyed a rich and persuasive visual culture. These images have constructed, sustained, and disseminated social values and identities, but this unwieldy, sometimes untidy form of cultural expression has received less systematic attention than other modes of depicting American life. Recently, scholars in the humanities have developed a new critical approach to reading images and the cultural work they perform. This practice, American cultural iconography, is generating sophisticated analyses of how images organize our public life. The contributions to this volume exhibit the extraordinary scope and interpretive power of this interdisciplinary study while illuminating the dark corners of the nation's psyche.

Drawing on such varied texts and visual media as daguerreotypes, political cartoons, tourist posters, and religious artifacts, these essays explore how pictures and words combine to teach us who we are and who we are not. They examine mimesis in elegant portraits of black Freemasons, industrial-age representations of national parks, and postwar photographs of atomic destruction. They consider how visual culture has described and disclosed the politics of racialized sexuality, whether subconsciously affirming it in the shadows of film noir or deliberately contesting it through the interethnic incest of John Sayles's Lone Star. Students of literature, film, and history will find that these essays extend the frontier of American studies.

The contributors are Maurice Wallace, Dennis Berthold, Alan Trachtenberg, Shirley Samuels, Jenny Franchot, Cecelia Tichi, Eric Lott, Bryan C. Taylor, and José E. Limón.

Author / Editor information

Larry J. Reynolds is Professor of English and Thomas Franklin Mayo Professor of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. He is the author of European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance and The Making and Breaking of the Concord Circle. Gordon Hutner is Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of American Literature, American Culture and Secrets and Sympathies: Forms of Disclosure in Hawthorne's Novels and the editor of The American Literary History Reader.

Reviews

"This volume constitutes an important, very teachable collection, and will come to serve as a central reference for both scholars and students in the fields of American Studies, American Art History, Film Studies, and African-American Studies."—Laura Rigal, author of The American Manufactory

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
List of Illustrations Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Contributors Publicly Available Download PDF	xiii
Introduction American Cultural Iconography Larry J. Reynolds Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART ONE: BETWEEN IMAGE AND NARRATIVE: FIGURING AMERICAN COLLECTIVITY
CHAPTER 1 Seeing and Believing: Hawthorne's Reflections on the Daguerreotype in The House of the Seven Gables Alan Trachtenberg Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	29
Chapter 2 Nuclear Pictures and Metapictures Bryan C. Taylor Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	52
CHAPTER 3 Pittsburgh at Yellowstone: Old Faithful and the Pulse of Industrial America Cecelia Tichi Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	83
Chapter 4 Melville, Garibaldi, and the Medusa of Revolution Dennis Berthold Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	104
PART TWO: REPRESENTATIONAL FRAMEWORKS AND THEIR OTHERS: THE POLITICS OF RACIALIZED GENDER AND SEXUALITY
Chapter 5 Miscegenated America: The Civil War Shirley Samuels Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	139
Chapter 6 The Whiteness of Film Noir Eric Lott Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	159
Chapter 7 "Are We Men?": Prince Hall, Martin Delany, and the Masculine Ideal in Black Freemasonry, 1775-1865 Maurice Wallace Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	182
Chapter 8 Unseemly Commemoration: Religion, Fragments, and the Icon Jenny Franchot Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	211
Chapter 9 Tex-Sex-Mex: American Identities, Lone Stars, and the Politics of Racialized Sexuality Jose E. Limon Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	229