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The antebellum period was a time of intensive American cultural production during which a genuine American national and cultural identity was produced. The American Revolution was the ‘natural’ starting point for this process of cultural re-imagination. This book investigates the contribution of images about the American Revolution to the formation of an American historical and cultural memory. Visual Representations of American Revolutionary figures and events in popular history paintings, lithographs, pictorial histories, and illustrated magazines from the 1830s to the 1850s have created a visual archive that was seminal in the Americans’ establishment of a “usable past.” As sites of memory, these visuals helped to define the American nation, often stabilizing larger unifying national narratives, but sometimes also contesting historical and cultural memories within the storehouse of visual commemoration.

Giorgio Mariani rigorously engages with the essential question of what makes a text explicitly anti-war. Ranging from Emerson and Joel Barlow to Maxine Hong Kingston and Tim O'Brien, Waging War on War explores why sustained attempts at identifying the anti-war text's formal and philosophical features seem to always end at an impasse. Mariani moves a step beyond to construct a theoretical model that invites new inquiries into America's nonviolent, nonconformist tradition even as it challenges the ways we study U.S. warmaking and the cultural reactions to it. In the process, he shows how the ideal of nonviolence and a dislike of war have been significant, if nonhegemonic, features of American culture since the nation's early days.

Trajectories of Freedom in American Literature explores the ways in which U.S. foundational conceptualizations and ideals of freedom have infused the literary imagination and informed the representational strategies of writers belonging to different periods of American literary history. The search for freedom has been approached not simply as a theme that runs through U.S. literature, but as a discourse that informs American literary works at various artistic and formal levels: from the revision of established conventions of genre and closure, to the relationship with the very notion of literary authorship and the conceptualization of literary oppositionality. The authors discussed in this volume span the period from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century, offering insight into the poetics and the politics of freedom in American literature.

Dopo una vita passata a studiare gli Stati Uniti, Tiziano Bonazzi si lascia sedurre dalla Fata ignorante di Magritte, con il suo volto a metà luminoso e a metà nero, per rincorrere ricordi e incontri. Ne nasce un libro sul cuore profondo della libertà, simbolo e progetto degli Stati Uniti, cuore nero di una società che non è mai stata una, ma tante, e la cui democrazia ha una lussureggiante, spesso caotica, base plurale che le istituzioni e i partiti si suppone debbano ridurre a unità. Da Lincoln a Trump, si rincorrono incontri, ricordi, e dialoghi con i grandi del passato. Un viaggio tra religione, spirito di intraprendenza, lotte civili, profonde spaccature e antagonismi: tutto ciò che fa e non fa l’America di oggi.