Constituting «Americanness»

This work in cultural history and literary criticism suggests a fresh and fruitful approach to the old notion of Americanness . Following Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte , the author proposes that Americanness is not an ordinary word, but a concept with a historically specific semantic field. In the three decades before the Civil War, Americanness was constituted at the intersection of several concepts, in different stages of their respective histories; among these, nation, representatio