Search results for ""author benjamin hoffmann""

Located some 600 miles from the coast of India, Sentinel Island is the home of the last people entirely cut off from the modern world, the Sentinelese. No one knows where they come from, what language they speak, their beliefs. Only one thing is certain: for centuries they have violently rejected outsiders who set foot on their island, including Venetian travellers, British colonists, shipwrecked Chinese, Malaysian poachers, European monarchs, or American missionaries. Sentinel Island tells the story of this people and of Krish and Markus, two friends who have little in common other than their fascination with this forbidden island. One is an anthropologist of Indian origin in a badly fraught marriage to an American woman; the other an unmarried New York editor, heir to an enormous fortune built in the art market. Swept up in a grand adventure, Sentinel Island is the story of peoples in far-flung places, friendship, class relations, contemporary America, the gradual unravelling of an interracial marriage—and the story of globalization and those who attempt to escape it.

Read more less

Located some 600 miles from the coast of India, Sentinel Island is the home of the last people entirely cut off from the modern world, the Sentinelese. No one knows where they come from, what language they speak, their beliefs. Only one thing is certain: for centuries they have violently rejected outsiders who set foot on their island, including Venetian travellers, British colonists, shipwrecked Chinese, Malaysian poachers, European monarchs, or American missionaries. Sentinel Island tells the story of this people and of Krish and Markus, two friends who have little in common other than their fascination with this forbidden island. One is an anthropologist of Indian origin in a badly fraught marriage to an American woman; the other an unmarried New York editor, heir to an enormous fortune built in the art market. Swept up in a grand adventure, Sentinel Island is the story of peoples in far-flung places, friendship, class relations, contemporary America, the gradual unravelling of an interracial marriage—and the story of globalization and those who attempt to escape it.

Read more less

Benjamin Hoffmann’s Posthumous America examines the literary idealization of a lost American past in the works of French writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For writers such as John Hector St. John de Crèvecœur and Claude-François de Lezay-Marnésia, America was never more potent as a driving ideal than in its loss. Examining the paradoxical American paradise depicted in Crèvecœur’s Lettres d’un cultivateur américain (1784); the “uchronotopia”—the imaginary perfect society set in America and based on what France might have become without the Revolution—of Lezay-Marnésia’s Lettres écrites des rives de l’Ohio (1792); and the political and nationalistic motivations behind François-René Chateaubriand’s idealization of America in Voyage en Amérique (1827) and Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1850), Hoffmann shows how the authors’ liberties with the truth helped create the idealized and nostalgic representation of America that dominated the collective European consciousness of their times. From a historical perspective, Posthumous America works to determine when exactly these writers stopped transcribing what they actually observed in America and started giving imaginary accounts of their experiences.A vital contribution to transatlantic studies, this detailed exploration of French perspectives on the colonial era, the War of Independence, and the birth of the American Republic sheds new light on the French fascination with America. Posthumous America will be invaluable for historians, political scientists, and specialists of literature whose scholarship looks at America through European eyes.

Read more less

Benjamin Hoffmann’s Posthumous America examines the literary idealization of a lost American past in the works of French writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For writers such as John Hector St. John de Crèvecœur and Claude-François de Lezay-Marnésia, America was never more potent as a driving ideal than in its loss. Examining the paradoxical American paradise depicted in Crèvecœur’s Lettres d’un cultivateur américain (1784); the “uchronotopia”—the imaginary perfect society set in America and based on what France might have become without the Revolution—of Lezay-Marnésia’s Lettres écrites des rives de l’Ohio (1792); and the political and nationalistic motivations behind François-René Chateaubriand’s idealization of America in Voyage en Amérique (1827) and Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1850), Hoffmann shows how the authors’ liberties with the truth helped create the idealized and nostalgic representation of America that dominated the collective European consciousness of their times. From a historical perspective, Posthumous America works to determine when exactly these writers stopped transcribing what they actually observed in America and started giving imaginary accounts of their experiences.A vital contribution to transatlantic studies, this detailed exploration of French perspectives on the colonial era, the War of Independence, and the birth of the American Republic sheds new light on the French fascination with America. Posthumous America will be invaluable for historians, political scientists, and specialists of literature whose scholarship looks at America through European eyes.

Read more less

First published in French in 1792, Letters Written from the Banks of the Ohio tells the fascinating story of French aristocrat Claude-François de Lezay-Marnésia and the utopia he attempted to create in what is now Ohio. Looking to build a perfect society based on what France might have become without the Revolution, Lezay-Marnésia bought more than twenty thousand acres of land along the banks of the Ohio River from the Scioto Company, which promised French aristocrats a fertile, conflict-free refuge. But hostilities between the U.S. Army and the Native American tribes who still lived on the land prevented the marquis from taking possession. Ruined and on the verge of madness, Lezay-Marnésia returned to France just as the Revolution was taking a more radical turn. He barely escaped the guillotine before dying a few years later in poverty and desperation.This edition of the Letters, introduced and edited by Benjamin Hoffmann and superbly translated by Alan J. Singerman, presents the work for the first time since the beginning of the nineteenth century—and the first time ever in English. The volume features a rich collection of supplementary documents, including texts by Lezay-Marnésia’s son, Albert de Lezay-Marnésia, and the American novelist Hugh Henry Brackenridge. This fresh perspective on the young United States as it was represented in French literature casts new light on a captivating and tumultuous period in the history of two nations.

Read more less