Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Prologue: Eyes on the Stranger
Introduction
1. Face to Face with the Stranger
1.1. Ralph Waldo Emerson on National Identity
1.2. Herman Melville’s Redburn: In the Company of Strangers
1.3. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Foreign Reflections
2. The Domestic Other
2.1. James Fenimore Cooper: Defining Master and Servant
2.2. Walt Whitman: A Sympathetic Glance at “Bridget”
3. Landscape with Strangers
3.1. Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Changing Face of America
3.2. Henry David Thoreau and His Foreign Neighbors
4. Views from the City
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Leonardo Buonomo is associate professor of American literature at the University of Trieste.

Reviews

Buonomo sheds new light on canonical and lesser-known writers. . . .Buonomo’s rigorously documented archival work is enlightening and inspiring, and the strength of his argument, coupled with his refusal to simplify or to dismiss the myriad ambiguities and complexities of the topic at hand, make the book a precious contribution to the scholarship on 19th-century American literature and culture, and on both Ethnic Studies and Whiteness Studies. . . .In this volume, Leonardo Buonomo has not only convincingly put the foreigner at center stage . . . but he has claimed a fundamental position for it at the heart of the national identity formation. In doing so, his work acquires an important currency in today’s cultural and political landscape, as it mirrors and evokes contemporary debates on migration, on the relationship between multiculturalism and national identities, on racism and class struggle, and on seemingly unbridgeable cultural gaps between contiguous communities.
*Iperstoria*

[This book is] an inherently impressive body of seminal scholarship deftly organized into four major chapters. . . .[This book] is very highly recommended for both community and academic library 19th Century American Literature reference collections and supplemental studies lists.
*Midwest Book Review*