Bennett, B orcid.org/0000-0002-2751-5309 (Cover date: 2018) The Silence Surrounding the Hut: Architecture and Absence in Wieland. Early American Literature, 53 (2). pp. 369-404. ISSN 0012-8163
Abstract
This article brings together recent work in literary studies and architectural history to plot the coded, and strategic, disavowal of slavery in early America by re-imagining deliberately submerged narratives of race in landscape and architecture. Using fictional and actual buildings, particularly Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and the structures on the Mettingen estate in Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798), the article traces the ways that the architectural vernaculars and embedded metaphors of the early United States project a familiar set of idealized values across a range of registers and scales. The binary constituted from figurations of enslavement (huts and the workplaces of slaves) and neoclassical architecture (including temples) were entirely familiar to early Americans. The novel reveals the consequences of a failure properly to acknowledge, or address, the silence surrounding the hut. It reveals a growing anxiety about the construction and shaping of national identity, in which the disavowed significance of racial others threatens the stability, and safety, of white Americans. The troubling elements of the novel are characteristic of larger narrative depictions of dark secrets and gendered and racialized violence in other fiction of the early Republic.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | Copyright © 2018 by the University of North Carolina Press. From Early American Literature, Volume 53, Pages 369-404. Used by permission of the publisher. https://www.uncpress.org |
Keywords: | Charles Brockden Brown; slavery in early America; neoclassical architecture; Wieland; temples and huts; Monticello |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of English (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 06 Nov 2017 15:05 |
Last Modified: | 02 Dec 2019 14:29 |
Published Version: | https://muse.jhu.edu/article/696821 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | University of North Carolina Press |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:123096 |