Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• HYDE, CARRIE

Titel

OUTCAST PATRIOTISM: THE DILEMMA OF NEGATIVE INSTRUCTION IN "THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY"

Ist Teil von

• ELH, 2010-12, Vol.77 (4), p.915-939

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2010

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Amid the several trials of uncertain and divided loyalties that mark the period-the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, the War of 1812, the Nullification crisis, and Confederate secession-citizens also found instructive, if negative, analogs in representations of traitors, expatriates, and slaves.3 Whereas imitative models move seamlessly from concrete actions to the ideals they embody, in negative instruction the ideals of conduct (what ought to be done) are inversely related to the events of the narrative (what actually transpires). Though The Man Without a Country has generally been relegated to little more than a footnote in literary criticism, it has been widely reprinted since its first appearance in The Atlantic Monthly in 1863, has inspired plays and films, and most notably served for years as a standard text in secondary education.8 Even before the appearance of school editions of The Man Without a Country in the 1890s, the tale had already attained an almost mythical pedagogical status.9 One reviewer in 1868, remarking on the story's strange power to bring [patriotism] to the light of consciousness, recalls transformative classroom readings of the 1863 edition of the story: We have known that story, when read in school from the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, to draw tears from the eyes of young men who but a few months later answered the call for 'three hundred thousand more' [soldiers].