Publisher's Synopsis
Stefanie Schäfer provides a study of the Yankee's many facets. Reading together 'Yankee Doodle', 'Brother Jonathan', 'Uncle Sam', the 'Yankee Peddler' and the 'Down Easter', she highlights the Yankee's ambiguity: His performance hinges on storytelling and fraudulence. An invention of transatlantic origin, the Yankee straddles regional and sectional, rural and urban, working class and bourgeois US identities. For nineteenth-century audiences at home and abroad, he becomes the hegemonic embodiment of US national character, its political and material culture and the homespun agent of its imperial fantasies.
