Abstract
An in-depth examination of liminality and race in early US fiction Offers a Critical Whiteness study of early US fiction with innovative readings of canonical and lesser-known texts Brings together fiction and multiple discourses on White racial identity in the early US: natural history, medical science, blackface minstrelsy, abolitionism and anti-abolitionism, mesmerism, spiritualism Contributes to ongoing work in early US fiction race studies by reading White male characters as figures of otherness Hannah Lauren Murray shows that early US authors repeatedly imagined lost, challenged and negated White racial identity in the new nation. In a Critical Whiteness reading of canonical and lesser-known texts from Charles Brockden Brown to Frank J. Webb, Murray argues that White characters on the border between life and death were liminal presences that disturbed prescriptions of racial belonging in the early US. Fears of losing Whiteness were routinely channelled through the language of liminality, in a precursor to today’s White anxieties of marginalisation and minoritisation.
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