Introduction

This book examines American literary texts whose portrayal of "American" identity involves the incorporation of a "foreign body" as the precondition for a comprehensive understanding of itself. This nexus of disconcerting textual dynamics arises precisely insofar as both citizen/subject and national identity depend upon a certain alterity, an "other" which constitutes the secondary term of a binary structure.

"American" identity thus finds itself ironically con-fused and interwoven with another culture or another nation, double-crossed in the enactment of itself.

Individual chapters are devoted to Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain.