Dangerous Giving in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

This book explores the dark, unruly, and self-destructive side of gift-giving as represented in nineteenth-century literary works by American authors. It asserts the centrality and relevance of gift exchange for modern American literary and intellectual history and reveals the ambiguity of the gift in various social and cultural contexts, including those of race, sex, gender, religion, consumption, and literature. Focusing on authors as diverse as Emerson, Kirkland, Child, Sedgwick, Hawthorne, Poe, Douglass, Stowe, Holmes, Henry James, Twain, Howells, Wilkins Freeman, and O. Henry as well as lesser-known, obscure, and anonymous authors, Dangerous Giving explores ambivalent relations between dangerous gifts, modern ideology of disinterested giving, and sentimental tradition.

Autorentext

Alexandra Urakova is a senior researcher at the A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature, Moscow, Russia. She holds a title of docent in North American Studies at the University of Helsinki and is a Kone Foundation fellow in Finland. Her research interests include nineteenth-century American literature, social and cultural history, and anthropology.

Inhalt

1 Introduction2 Gifts, Language, Ideology, and the Sentimental3 Sentimental "Potlatch" and the Making of the Nation4 Un-Gendering the Gift Book5 Racial Identity and the Perils of Giving6 The Poison of the Gift, The Race of the Gift7 Pure Tokens and Venomous Bodies8 The Gift/Gifts of Death9 "The Season of Gifts": Christmas and Melancholia10 Conclusion