Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: New World Paradoxes

1. Saint-John de Crèvecoeur and Nostalgia for Colonial America

2. Lezay-Marnésia and Nostalgia for the American Golden Age

3. Chateaubriand and Nostalgia for French America

Conclusion: America, a Mobile Sign

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Benjamin Hoffmann is Assistant Professor of Early Modern French Studies at The Ohio State University. His recent publications include a critical edition of Claude-François de Lezay-Marnésia’s Letters Written from the Banks of the Ohio, also published by Penn State University Press, as well as four novels in French.

About the translator:

Alan J. Singerman is Richardson Professor Emeritus of French at Davidson College, the translator of Benjamin Hoffmann’s critical edition of Letters Written from the Banks of the Ohio, and the editor and translator of Abbé Prévost’s novel The Greek Girl’s Story, both also published by Penn State University Press.

Reviews

“Benjamin Hoffmann presents, with wonderful insight, a portrait of a young American nation by three French writers. The particular oddity of their perspective, hence the delightful originality of this work, is that what they depict in their various ways is a society and polity that they know to be no longer valid—for which Hoffmann coins the term of ‘posthumous’ narrative, sometimes tainted with nostalgia or outright fiction, in an already-archaic American landscape.”—Philip Stewart,author of Engraven Desire: Eros, Image, and Text in the French Eighteenth Century

“A welcome reexamination of major texts.”—Stamos Metzidakis H-France