Death of a Nation : American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism

Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. First Printing . Trade Paperback. Very Good. 6" x 9. Corrigan, Mariah - Cover Design. 352 Pages Indexed. Minor oil type stains to bottom outside of last 25 pages. In the 1940s, American thought experienced a cataclysmic paradigm shift. Before then, national ideology was shaped by American exceptionalism and bourgeois nationalism: elites saw themselves as the children of a homogeneous nation standing outside the history and culture of the Old World. This view repressed the cultures of those who did not fit the elite vision: people of color, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants. David W. Noble rejected the ideals of his intellectual predecessors and sought a new, multicultural, postnational scholarship. Throughout his career, Noble has examined this rupture in American intellectual life. In Death of a Nation, he presents the culmination of decades of thought in a sweeping treatise on the shaping of contemporary American studies. Contents in Eight Chapters: the Birth and Death of AMerican History, Historians Leaving Home Killing Fathers, The Crisis of American Literary Criticism from World War i to World War II, Elegies for the National Landscape, The New Literary Criticism The Death of the Nation Born in New England, The Vanishing National Landscape Painting Architecdture Music and Philosophy in the Early 20th Centurey, The Disintegration of National Boundaries Literary Criticism in the Late 20th Century, and The End of American History.