Writing Back: American Expatriates Narratives of Return

Susan Winnett

ISBN 10: 142140740X / ISBN 13: 9781421407401

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012

About this Item

As both Americans and expatriates, these writers gained a unique perspective on American culture, particularly in terms of gender roles, national identity, artistic self-conception, mobility, and global culture. Series: Rethinking Theory. Num Pages: 304 pages. BIC Classification: 1KBB; 2AB; DSBH. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 229 x 152 x 25. Weight in Grams: 544. . 2012. Hardcover. . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland.

Seller Inventory # V9781421407401

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Writing Back: American Expatriates Narratives of Return
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication Date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 142140740X
• ISBN 13: 9781421407401
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Explore the shock of the new―and the familiar―experienced by well-known expatriate writers when they returned to the United States.

The migration of American artists and intellectuals to Europe in the early twentieth century has been amply documented and studied, but few scholars have examined the aftermath of their return home. Writing Back focuses on the memoirs of modernist writers and intellectuals who struggled with their return to America after years of living abroad.

Susan Winnett establishes repatriation as related to but significantly different from travel and exile. She engages in close readings of several writers-in-exile, including Henry James, Harold Stearns, Malcolm Cowley, and Gertrude Stein.

Writing Back examines how repatriation unsettles the self-construction of the “returning absentee” by challenging the fictions of national and cultural identity with which the writer has experimented during the time abroad. As both Americans and expatriates, these writers gained a unique perspective on American culture, particularly in terms of gender roles, national identity, artistic self-conception, mobility, and global culture.

About the Author

Susan Winnett is University Professor of American Studies at the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf (Germany). She is the author of Terrible Sociability: The Text of Manners in Laclos, Goethe, and James.