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The traumatic colonel : the founding fathers, slavery, and the phantasmatic Aaron Burr

Title: The traumatic colonel : the founding fathers, slavery, and the phantasmatic Aaron Burr / Michael J. Drexler and Ed White.
Author: Drexler, Michael J.
Publication: New York : New York University Press, 2014.
Supplementary Content: Cover image

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan Available - Can be used on site. Please visit New York Public Library - Schwarzman Building to submit a request in person.	Text	Use in library	JFE 15-6753	Schwarzman Building - Main Reading Room 315

Details

Additional Authors

White, Ed, 1965-

Description

xxvi, 207 pages; 23 cm

Summary

"In American political fantasy, the Founding Fathers loom large, at once historical and mythical figures. In The Traumatic Colonel, Michael J. Drexler and Ed White examine the Founders as imaginative fictions, characters in the specifically literary sense, whose significance emerged from narrative elements clustered around them. From the revolutionary era through the 1790s, the Founders took shape as a significant cultural system for thinking about politics, race, and sexuality. Yet after 1800, amid the pressures of the Louisiana Purchase and the Haitian Revolution, this system could no longer accommodate the deep anxieties about the United States as a slave nation. Drexler and White assert that the most emblematic of the political tensions of the time is the figure of Aaron Burr, whose rise and fall were detailed in the literature of his time: his electoral tie with Thomas Jefferson in 1800, the accusations of seduction, the notorious duel with Alexander Hamilton, his machinations as the schemer of a breakaway empire, and his spectacular treason trial. The authors venture a psychoanalytically-informed exploration of post-revolutionary America to suggest that the figure of 'Burr' was fundamentally a displaced fantasy for addressing the Haitian Revolution. Drexler and White expose how the historical and literary fictions of the nation's founding served to repress the larger issue of the slave system and uncover the Burr myth as the crux of that repression. Exploring early American novels, such as the works of Charles Brockden Brown and Tabitha Gilman Tenney, as well as the pamphlets, polemics, tracts, and biographies of the early republican period, the authors speculate that this flourishing of political writing illuminates the notorious gap in U.S. literary history between 1800 and 1820"--

Series Statement

America and the long 19th century

Uniform Title

America and the long 19th century.

Subjects

Note

"Also available as an ebook"--Title page verso.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Burrology : Extracts -- Introduction -- The Semiotics of the founders -- Hors Monde, or the fantasy structure of Republicanism -- Female Quixotism and the fantasy of region -- Burr's formation, 1800-1804 -- Burr's deployment, 1804-1807 -- Conclusion.

Call Number

JFE 15-6753

ISBN

9781479871674 (cloth : acid-free paper)
1479871672 (cloth : acid-free paper)
9781479842537 (paper : acid-free paper)
1479842532 (paper : acid-free paper)

LCCN

2013049743

OCLC

863195427

Author

Drexler, Michael J.

Title

The traumatic colonel : the founding fathers, slavery, and the phantasmatic Aaron Burr / Michael J. Drexler and Ed White.

Publisher

New York : New York University Press, 2014.

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Series

America and the long 19th century

America and the long 19th century.

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Connect to:

Cover image

Added Author

White, Ed, 1965-

Research Call Number

JFE 15-6753

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