Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction

In a quick coda, Murry powerfully connects the dots to the United States today, showing how fears of white marginality continue fueling the powerfully exclusionary logics of whiteness. This is a book that is generous to its predecessors across an array of fields, and that gives new liveliness and relevance to familiar debates about the destructive innovation of white citizenship in the newly United States. -- Dana D. Nelson, Vanderbilt University * Early American Literature *
In a quick coda, Murry powerfully connects the dots to the United States today, showing how fears of white marginality continue fueling the powerfully exclusionary logics of whiteness. This is a book that is generous to its predecessors across an array of fields, and that gives new liveliness and relevance to familiar debates about the destructive innovation of white citizenship in the newly United States. -- Dana D. Nelson, Vanderbilt University * Early American Literature *
As scholars of American literature and history know, White dread has been a haunting presence for a long, long time. Anxious fantasies of replacement, subsumption, diminution: in Liminal Whiteness, Hannah Murray raises these spirits, and gets them to speak in new tongues. Across agile readings of figures from Brockden Brown, Poe and Melville to Robert Montgomery Bird and Frank Webb, Liminal Whiteness vivifies a rich literary counter-history and gives us new purchase on the shifting terrain of reactive White fantasy. -- Peter Coviello, University of Illinois Chicago