Book contents
- Frontmatter
- General Introduction
- PART ONE INVENTING THE AMERICAN NOVEL
- PART TWO REALISM, PROTEST, ACCOMMODATION
- Introduction: realism, protest, accommodation
- 17 Realism and radicalism: the school of Howells
- 18 James, pragmatism, and the realist ideal
- 19 Theories of the American novel in the age of realism
- 20 The novel in postbellum print culture
- 21 Twain, class, and the Gilded Age
- 22 Dreiser and the city
- 23 Novels of civic protest
- 24 Novels of American business, industry, and consumerism
- 25 New Americans and the immigrant novel
- 26 Cather and the regional imagination
- 27 Wharton, marriage, and the New Woman
- 28 The postbellum race novel
- 29 The African American novel after Reconstruction
- 30 The rise of naturalism
- 31 Imagining the frontier
- 32 Imperialism, Orientalism, and empire
- 33 The hemispheric novel in the post-revolutionary era
- 34 The woman's novel beyond sentimentalism
- 35 Dime novels and the rise of mass-market genres
- 36 Readers and reading groups
- PART THREE MODERNISM AND BEYOND
- PART FOUR CONTEMPORARY FORMATIONS
- A selected bibliography
- Index
25 - New Americans and the immigrant novel
from PART TWO - REALISM, PROTEST, ACCOMMODATION
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2011
- Frontmatter
- General Introduction
- PART ONE INVENTING THE AMERICAN NOVEL
- PART TWO REALISM, PROTEST, ACCOMMODATION
- Introduction: realism, protest, accommodation
- 17 Realism and radicalism: the school of Howells
- 18 James, pragmatism, and the realist ideal
- 19 Theories of the American novel in the age of realism
- 20 The novel in postbellum print culture
- 21 Twain, class, and the Gilded Age
- 22 Dreiser and the city
- 23 Novels of civic protest
- 24 Novels of American business, industry, and consumerism
- 25 New Americans and the immigrant novel
- 26 Cather and the regional imagination
- 27 Wharton, marriage, and the New Woman
- 28 The postbellum race novel
- 29 The African American novel after Reconstruction
- 30 The rise of naturalism
- 31 Imagining the frontier
- 32 Imperialism, Orientalism, and empire
- 33 The hemispheric novel in the post-revolutionary era
- 34 The woman's novel beyond sentimentalism
- 35 Dime novels and the rise of mass-market genres
- 36 Readers and reading groups
- PART THREE MODERNISM AND BEYOND
- PART FOUR CONTEMPORARY FORMATIONS
- A selected bibliography
- Index
Summary
Concern about immigration to the USA is nothing new. Even before the Revolution, in 1751, Benjamin Franklin stated his qualms regarding newcomers, including those “who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs any more than they can acquire our Complexion.” Franklin goes on to explain that “the Number of purely white people in the World” is dwarfed by the “black or tawny” of Africa and Asia, and even most Europeans “are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion.” Only the Saxon Germans and the English should be allowed into the colonies, Franklin says, so that the “lovely White and Red” of the region can shine up to the heavens. Less color conscious, Thomas Jefferson worried more about the challenges faced by immigrants who leave strict monarchies for a nation governed by “the freest principles of the English constitution, with others derived from natural right and natural reason.” Immigrants attempting this shift, Jefferson says, “will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness.” These polar positions will be passed on to their children and, via the democratic process, lead to legislation being determined by “a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.” Both Franklin and Jefferson reveal a position often taken in subsequent immigration discourse: national security is founded on commonality, whether that commonality is a matter of complexion or of cultural conformity.
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- The Cambridge History of the American Novel , pp. 426 - 436Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
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