Abstract
A systematic study of the most iconic national character in the US in nineteenth-century literature and culture Yankee Yarns provides the first systematic study of the Yankee’s formation in 19th century US culture Critiques US national historiographies by revealing an indulgence in storytelling, fraudulence, and self-irony at the heart of the US national character Argues that US national culture is originally transnational and transatlantic In this book, Stefanie Schäfer provides the first study of the Yankee’s many facets. Reading together Yankee Doodle, Brother Jonathan, Uncle Sam, the Yankee Peddler and the Down Easter, she highlights the Yankee’s ambiguity: His performance hinges on storytelling and fraudulence. An invention of transatlantic origin, the Yankee straddles regional and sectional, rural and urban, working class and bourgeois US identities. For nineteenth-century audiences at home and abroad, he becomes the hegemonic embodiment of US national character, its political and material culture and the homespun agent of its imperial fantasies.
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