Description
Book SynopsisAn English translation of Benjamin Hoffmann’s French monograph L’Amérique posthume. Examines the literary idealization of a lost American past in eighteenth-century French literature.
Trade Review“Benjamin Hoffmann presents, with wonderful insight, a portrait of a young American nation by three French writers. The particular oddity of their perspective, hence the delightful originality of this work, is that what they depict in their various ways is a society and polity that they know to be no longer valid—for which Hoffmann coins the term of ‘posthumous’ narrative, sometimes tainted with nostalgia or outright fiction, in an already-archaic American landscape.”
—Philip Stewart,author of Engraven Desire: Eros, Image, and Text in the French Eighteenth Century
“A welcome reexamination of major texts.”
—Stamos Metzidakis H-France
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: New World Paradoxes
1. Saint-John de Crèvecoeur and Nostalgia for Colonial America
2. Lezay-Marnésia and Nostalgia for the American Golden Age
3. Chateaubriand and Nostalgia for French America
Conclusion: America, a Mobile Sign
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index
