Imitation as resistance

Imitation as Resistance studies American responses to British literature during the nineteenth century. Ranging widely, it includes American writings that echo, parody, or pay tribute to British texts, appropriations of British texts in American elocutionary and literary handbooks, and adaptions of British texts for the American stage.

Author Raoul Granqvist postulates that imitation as cultural dialectics lies at the heart of every colonial or post-colonial society that seeks to find a way out of years of dependence; this was also the case with the nineteenth-century America. In its endeavor to establish its own cultural boundaries, its own space, it sought frantically to free itself from dependence on Old World value systems and worldviews.

Simultaneously - and here lies the paradox that this book takes advantage of - it sought and found fresh nourishment in the Old World gardens that it despised. Imitation, Granqvist argues, then involved acts of creative resistance and inversion.

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Imitation as Resistance also offers American perspectives on the individual reputations of a number of British writers and their specific works, often down to the particular lines in plays and poems. The reader whose interest is limited, for example, to the singular reputation of a Dickens novel or a Byron poem may find the book functional for its broad bibliographical qualities.

For cultural studies students, Americanists, and others, the book will demonstrate the complexity of cultural appropriation and the patterns of nineteenth-century American resistance and harmonization.