This book examines the close relationship between the portrayal of foreigners and the delineation of culture and identity in antebellum American writing. Both literary and historical in its approach this study shows how in a period marked by extensive immigration heated debates on national and racial traits during a flowering in American letters encouraged responses from American authors to outsiders that not only contain precious insights into nineteenthcentury Americas selfconstruction but also serve to illuminate our own times multicultural societies. The authors under consideration are alternately canonical Emerson Hawthorne Melville recently rediscovered Kirkland or simply neglected Arthur. The texts analyzed cover such different genres as diaries letters newspapers manuals novels stories and poems. show more