Novel Nostalgias establishes how the longing to recover a lost home or past drove some of the central conflicts of the nineteenth-century United States. Providing one of the few U.S. literary histories that examines cultural material from both before and after the Civil War, John Funchion argues that a diverse array of novels, from William Wells Brown’s Clotel to L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, imagined new politically—and antagonistically—charged communities through forms of nostalgic longing.
John Funchion is Associate Professor of English at the University of Miami. His essays have appeared in Early American Literature, Modern Language Quarterly, Modernist Cultures, and The Henry James Review. He has co-edited and contributed an essay to Mapping Regions in Early American Writing (University of Georgia Press, 2015). He is currently at work on two new projects. His second book manuscript, Reading against the Law: Localities of Dissent in the Early Republic, establishes how regional writers in the U.S. engaged novelists, poets, revolutionaries, and legal thinkers across the Atlantic and throughout the Caribbean to challenge the rising dominance of legal and literary federalism in the early nineteenth century. He has also begun developing a digital humanities project, [alt] Periodicals, which will provide a searchable archive of radical and alternative periodicals published in the U.S. between 1865 and 1919.
