IJELS p-ISSN: 
Email this article 
The Identities of Young America: A Case of American Exceptionalism and Emerging Identities in Letters from an American Farmer
(1) Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
(*) Corresponding Author
Abstract
This article is an attempt to examine the emerging identities and the primary examples of exceptionalism in early American literature by a review of excerpts from the "Letters from an American Farmer" written by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. To this end, after a brief introduction, exceptionalism is defined and explained as a political and ideological attitude. Then, a brief overview of pre-revolution and war literature is provided along with some prominent examples of literary works. Finally, after introducing the author’s work, the third letter of the above series entitled "What is an American?" is selected and analyzed within the theoretical framework of this article which addresses the emergence of American identity in early literary works. More specifically, the present article examines the American social life, emerging identities and the early signs of exceptionalism from Crèvecoeur’s perspective. As a conclusion, the analysis of selected excerpts shows that there are rudimentary elements and examples of this ideology in the case under study.
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Ahlstrom, S. E. (2004). A Religious History of the American People (2nd ed.). Yale University Press.
Althusser, L. (1971). "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)." Lenin and Philosoplzy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review P, pp. 127-86.
Alexander, R. J. (1981). The Right Opposition: The Lovestoneites and the International Communist Opposition of the 1930s. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Appleby, J. (1992). "Recovering America's Historic Diversity: Beyond Exceptionalism." Journal of American History, 79, pp. 419-31.
Balibar, E. (1995). The Philosophy of Marx. Verso (French edition: La philosophie de Marx, La Découverte, Repères, 1991).
Bremer, F. J. (1995). The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards (Revised ed.). University Press of New England.
Bremer, F. J. (2009). Puritanism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
Breen, T. H. "Subjecthood and Citizenship: The Context of James Otis's Radical Critique of John Locke," New England Quarterly (Sep., 1998) 71,3, pp. 378–403
Brennan, E. E. (1939). "James Otis: Recreant and Patriot," New England Quarterly, 12: 691–725.
Cooper, J. F., Jr. (1999). Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts. Religion in America. New York: Oxford University Press.
de Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John (1981). Albert E. Stone (ed.). Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America. Penguin Classics.
de Tocqueville, A. (1945). Democracy in America. Vintage Books.
de Tocqueville, Alexis (1835). De la démocratie en Amérique. I (1st ed.). Paris: Librairie de Charles Gosselin.
Draper, T. (1957). The Roots of American Communism. New York: Viking, 1957.
Draper, T. (1960). American Communism and Soviet Russia: The Formative Period. New York: Viking, 1960.
Farrell, J. M. (2006). "The Writs of Assistance and Public Memory: John Adams and the Legacy of James Otis," New England Quarterly, 79, 4, pp. 533–556.
Franklin, B. (2005). Lemay, J.A. Leo (ed.). Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography, Poor Richard: Autobiography, Poor Richard, and Later Writings. New York: Library of America.
Gray, R. (2011). A History of American Literature. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.
Jehlen, M. (1986). American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Kidd, T. S. (2010). God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution. New York: Basic Books.
LeBlanc, Paul, & T. Davenport, eds. (2015). The "American Exceptionalism" of Jay Lovestone and His Comrades, 1929-1940: Dissident Marxism in the United States, Volume 1. Leiden, NL: Brill.
Lipset, S. M. (1996). American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. New York, N.Y.: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.
Miller, J. C. (1943). Origins of the American Revolution, pp 46-7, Little, Brown & Company, Boston, Massachusetts.
Nash, G. B. (2005). The Unknown American Revolution, pp. 21-23, Viking, New York, New York.
Paine, T. (1986) [1776], Kramnick, Isaac (ed.), Common Sense, New York: Penguin Classics.
Pease, D. E. (2009). The New American Exceptionalism. University of Minnesota Press.
Plotkin, N. A. (1964). "Saint-John de Crevecoeur Rediscovered: Critic or Panegyrist?", French Historical Studies, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 390–404.
Turner, J. & P. Oakes (1986). The significance of the social identity concept for social psychology with reference to individualism, interactionism and social influence. British Journal of Social Psychology. 25 (3), pp. 237–252.
Turner, J. C. & K. J. Reynolds (2010). "The story of social identity". In T. Postmes; N. Branscombe (eds.). Rediscovering Social Identity: Core Sources. Psychology Press.
Williams, R. (1976). Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.24071/ijels.v7i2.3622
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
IJELS Journal Sinta 4 Certificate (S4 = Level 4)
We would like to inform you that Indonesian Journal of English Language Studies (IJELS) has been nationally accredited Sinta 4 by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Technology of the Republic of Indonesia based on the decree No. Surat Keputusan 152/E/KPT/2023. Validity for 5 years: Vol 7 No 2, 2021 till Vol 12 No 1, 2026
This work is licensed under CC BY-SA.
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
IJELS e-ISSN 2715-0895; IJELS p-ISSN 2442-790X
Indonesian Journal of English Language Studies (IJELS) is published twice a year, namely in March and September, by the English Language Studies (ELS) of the Graduate Program of Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia.