		1956
		quarterly
		English, German

		literature, cultural studies, history, political science, linguistics, critical theory, teaching of American Studies

		0340-2827

		Winter


General Editors: Carmen Birkle Birgit Däwes Review Editor: Anke Ortlepp Editorial Board: Christa Buschendorf Ingrid Gessner Anke Ortlepp Heike Paul Marc Priewe Boris Vormann Associate Editors: Cedric Essi Johanna Heil Kathleen Loock Connor Pitetti

For our full submission guidelines, please visit https://dgfa.de/american-studies-a-quarterly-2/submitting/ For manuscripts and books for review, please contact our review editors at reviews@dgfa.de. There is no obligation to review unsolicited books. Amerikastudien / American Studies E-Mail: amst@dgfa.de In view of the computerized production of the journal, manuscripts of articles and reviews can only be accepted if submitted as computer files (preferably MS Word) and accompanied by a printout. Please note the following formal requirements: – Article manuscripts - manuscript text, abstract, notes, list of works cited - should not exceed 60,000 to 70,000 characters (including spaces). – All articles must be preceded by an abstract in English of no more than 200 words. – Since Amerikastudien / American Studies follows a double blind-peer review system, articles should contain no references to the author. – An Amerikastudien / American Studies style sheet is available under https://dgfa.de/american-studies-a-quarterly-2/article-style-sheet/ The editorial team gladly provides a MS Word document template file (DOT) that is used for pre-typesetting (preflighting).

Amerikastudien / American Studies

Amerikastudien / American Studies is the journal of the German Association for American Studies. It started as the annual Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien in 1956 and has since developed into a quarterly with some 1200 subscriptions in Europe and the United States. The journal is dedicated to interdisciplinary and transnational perspectives and embraces the diversity and dynamics of a dialogic and comparatist understanding of American Studies. It covers all areas of American Studies from literary and cultural criticism, history, political science, and linguistics to the teaching of American Studies. Special-topics issues alternate with regular ones. Reviews, forums, and annual bibliographies support the international circulation of German and European scholarship in American Studies.
(https://amst.winter-verlag.de/)
Editors: Carmen Birkle and Birgit Däwes
Review Editor: Anke Ortlepp
Address: Amerikastudien/American Studies
Prof. Dr. Carmen Birkle
Philipps-Universität Marburg
FB 10 Department of English and American Studies
Wilhelm-Röpke-Str. 6f
35032 Marburg, Germany
Phone: +49 6421-2824-345
E-Mail: amst@dgfa.de
or
Prof. Dr. Birgit Däwes
Europa-Universität Flensburg
Department of English and American Studies
Auf dem Campus 1
24943 Flensburg, Germany
E-Mail: amst@dgfa.de

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Amerikastudien / American Studies 2008: Inter-American Studies and Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 53, No. 1

Introduction: Inter-American Studies and Nineteenth-Century Literature

By Markus Heide and Gabriele Pisarz-Ramírez

Invasive Methods: The Opening of Latin America in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature

By Helmbrecht Breinig

During the nineteenth century, countless armed (military or filibustering) invasions, political interventions, acts of economic appropriation, and cultural (notably missionary) reeducation efforts by the United States or individual American citizens took place in virtually all parts of what was then and what is now Latin America. The motives ranged from territorial expansion or securing U.S. hegemony against European competitors or naked financial greed to an improvement of supposedly backward societies and civilizations. The respective geographical imaginations of both Latin America and the United States which informed these measures as well as the literary texts dealing with them follow certain established patterns. Anti-expansionists like Cooper or Melville avoided them by having their narratives take place in off-shore settings mirroring the instability of values and perceptions, but the jingoistic adventure novels of Frank R. Stockton do the same for the purpose of providing their protagonists direct naval access to the treasures they are to win and thus escape the need to deal with the complexities of Latin American life. Where these are actually depicted, the writers on both sides followed stereotypical assumptions even when they had extensive first-hand knowledge like travel writer John L. Stephens, who thus compares unfavorably with Alexander von Humboldt. The discursive pattern is still discernible at the end of the century in the adventure novels and travelogues of Richard Harding Davis. Only in the writings of Stephen Crane do we find a serious self-reflective stance vis-à-vis the role America and Americans played south of the border.

Herman Melville's 'Benito Cereno,' Inter-American Relations, and Literary Pan-Americanism

By Markus Heide

The novella "Benito Cereno" takes up such concerns as slavery, colonialism, and imperialism in a way that goes beyond the national context of the United States. As in much of Melville’s writing, an explicitly transnational fictional perspective is employed for the symbolical negotiation of conflict lines, historical controversies and predicaments of U.S. society and culture. "Benito Cereno," the following essay wants to suggest, does so in complex and decidedly Pan-American terms. The tale, simultaneously one about liberation and deception, appears particularly fruitful for an analysis of both fictional accounts of inter-American relations and the literary history of the postcolonial Americas.

Blurring the Boundaries of Gender: The Strong 'Spanish' Woman in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Popular Women's Writing

By Gabriele Pisarz-Ramírez
'Spanish' women enter American popular literature in notable numbers in the period af;ter the Mexican-American War, often as highly racialized figures. While they are frequently represented as exotic and passionate objects of desire in dime novels and other popular writings by male authors, popular women writers such as Augusta Evans, Louisa May Alcott, and May Agnes Fleming employ the figure of the 'Spanish' woman for the cautious subversion and violation of Victorian norms of femininity. The presence of the 'Spanish' woman of European or Latin American descent in these texts functions to dramatize the white female character's impulses of rebellion against contemporary limitations on white middle-class women. Drawing on stereotypical associations of the Latin woman with darkness, unruliness, impulsiveness, and excess, Evans, Alcott, and Fleming create racialized figures of 'Spanishness' which allow them to invent scenarios of independence and power.

The Imagined Inter-American Community of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton

By Josef Raab

María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (1832-1895) is among the best-remembered authors of nineteenth-century Mexican-American literature. However, her assimilationist position and her eminent social status are not characteristic of early Mexican-American writers in general, who tended to focus on resisting Anglo dominance. In her two major novels, Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) and The Squatter and the Don (1885), Ruiz de Burton acknowledges that there is a distinct mexicanidad, a defining cultural identity of people of Mexican descent. But her narrative construction of a group identity is not based on ethnicity: while her fictions exclude Mexican farm laborers, indios, mestizos, and the lower classes from this imagined community, they propagate an alliance of the wealthy and righteous among U.S. Mexicans as well as U.S. Anglos. This imagined community is exemplified by the central couple of The Squatter and the Don and is inspired by the author’s own marriage to a land-owning Anglo army captain in California. Its defining features concentrate on the class-based values and customs that could define a future inter-American elite. Ruiz de Burton’s elitism has created difficulties for the canon formation and self-definition of a Mexican-American literature that had traditionally highlighted ethnicity as well as working-class experiences and that had been focused on Mexican opposition to the Anglo mainstream rather than on the imaginative creation of an Anglo-Mexican community.

Nations, Regions, and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Texas: History in On the Long Tide and Caballero

By José Limón

This paper examines two historical novels written in Texas in the first third of the twentieth century but representing social life in mid-nineteenth-century Texas. The first, On the Long Tide by Laura Krey, addresses the Texas Revolution and Independence from Mexico beginning in the 1820s and climaxing in 1836. It does so from an Old South plantation perspective then transplanted to east Texas. The second, Caballero, co-authored by Jovita Gonzalez and Eve Raleigh, represents society in the largely Mexican settlement section of southern Texas on the eve of the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. The war directly impacted this society but also expanded the United States to its present border with Mexico and to the Pacific Ocean. Together, then, both novels speak of the period during which the very idea of the Americas as an interactive—if asymmetrical—alignment of new nations independent from the Old World comes into actual being with Mexico and the United States as the most proximate of these. Each novel offers a symbolic and seeming solution to the social conflict generated by the first interaction in Texas between Mexico and the United States. On the Long Tide proposes an idyllic continuation of Old South, white, plantation, slave-owning society in the new Texas territory wrested from Mexico, while Caballero offers a much more complex stance of negotiation and compromise between Mexicans and white Southerners in Texas. However, as novels of the first third of the twentieth century, both novels are also using a nineteenth-century idiom to address continuing concerns with race and ethnicity but also modernization in Texas, the South, and the United States in the historical prelude to the civil rights struggles of the mid-twentieth century. The paper closes with an assessment of these works from the perspective of critical regionalism.

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