Mittwoch, 26. Mai 2021, 17:00 - 18:30 iCal

ABGESAGT Yankees and Pirates in the Atlantic World

Erlesenes Erforschen

Aula am Campus der Universität Wien
Spitalgasse 2-4 / Hof 1.11, 1090 Wien

Buchpräsentation, Lesung


Book presentations and panel discussion.

The two monographs presented in this book launch shed light on cultural figures that many people are familiar with: The Pirate and the Yankee.

Alexandra Ganser's "Crisis and Legitimacy in Atlantic American Narratives of Piracy: 1678-1865" examines literary and visual representations of piracy in both canonical and understudied texts. The book argues that piracy acted as a trope to negotiate ideas of legitimacy in the contexts of U.S. colonialism, nationalism, and expansionism. The readings demonstrate how pirates were invoked at times when dominant conceptions of legitimacy, built upon categorizations of race, class, and gender, had come into crisis. As popular and mobile maritime outlaw figures, it is suggested, pirates asked questions about might and right at critical moments of Atlantic history.

Stefanie Schäfer's “Yankee Yarns. Storytelling and the Invention of the National Body in Nineteenth-Century American Culture” explores the most iconic national character in US 19th literature and culture, straddling regional and sectional, rural and urban, working class and bourgeois US identities - the Yankee. The book highlights the Yankee’s ambiguity as the embodiment of US national character, its political and material culture and the homespun agent of its imperial fantasies and critiques US national historiographies by revealing an indulgence in storytelling, fraudulence, and self-irony at the heart of the US national character.

Alexandra Ganser: “Crisis and Legitimacy in Atlantic American Narratives of Piracy”. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

Stefanie Schäfer: “Yankee Yarns. Storytelling and the Invention of the National Body in Nineteenth-Century American Culture”. Edinburgh UP, 2021.


Veranstalter

Universitätsbibliothek Wien


Kontakt

Florian Jaksche
Universitätsbibliothek Wien, Öffentlichkeitsarbeit
+43-1-4277-15077
events.ub@univie.ac.at