Remodeling the Nation: The Architecture of American Identity, 1776-1858 (Becoming Modern: New Nineteenth-Century Studies)

"In this interdisciplinary study, Duncan Faherty argues that throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Americans conceptualized their still unsettled political and social states through metaphors of home building. During this period, a pervasive concern with the design and furnishing of houses helped writers to manage previous encounters with settlements, both native and European, and to imagine and remodel a new national ideal. By aligning the period's architectural concerns (registered in both the interior and exterior of houses) with concurrent debates about the need to create a national identity in the wake of the American Revolution, Faherty demonstrates how representations of the house were a crucial locus for debating broadly shared concerns about the anxieties of nation building." "Richly informed by contemporary literary studies, history, art history, and cultural criticism, Remodeling the Nation ranges incisively across the work of political theorists, social critics, novelists, poets, natural historians, landscape artists, travel writers, and authors of architectural and domestic treatises."--Jacket.