Race Citizenship And Law In American Literature

Examines the interaction between civic identity, race and justice in American law and literature.

The book shows how American racial history and culture have shaped, and been shaped in turn by, American literature.

Citizenship, Race, and the Lawtakes a look at policies that have hindered people from becoming US citizens and the legal actions people of color have taken to be recognized by the federal government. Features include essential facts, a glossary, references, websites, source notes, and an index. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Essential Library is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.

A critical look at the mechanisms, beliefs, and ideologies that govern U.S. immigration laws, and the social impacts of their enforcement--Provided by publisher.

Table of contents

Lee demonstrates how Melville, Emerson and others tried to find rational solutions to the slavery conflict.

John D. Kerkering's study examines the literary history of racial and national identity in nineteenth-century America. Kerkering argues that writers such as DuBois, Lanier, Simms, and Scott used poetic effects to assert the distinctiveness of certain groups in a diffuse social landscape. Kerkering explores poetry's formal properties, its sound effects, as they intersect with the issues of race and nation. He shows how formal effects, ranging from meter and rhythm to alliteration and melody, provide these writers with evidence of a collective identity, whether national or racial. Through this shared reliance on formal literary effects, national and racial identities, Kerkering shows, are related elements of a single literary history. This is the story of how poetic effects helped to define national identities in Anglo-America as a step toward helping to define racial identities within the United States. This highly original study will command a wide audience of Americanists.