The Sibling Romance: Crisis and Affiliation in American Fiction, 1835-1900

FAIN: FT-59805-12

Emily Elspeth VanDette
SUNY Research Foundation, College at Fredonia (Fredonia, NY 14063-1127)

This project involves the rigorous revision of literary history to include domestic novels that engage narratives of American nationalism. With a special lens on sibling bonds as a narrative device, this project examines how fictional works shaped and reflected tumultuous movements of American identity formation. I seek the support of the NEH Summer Stipend in order to engage in full-time archival research and writing for a chapter that will complete my book project. The chapter recovers a critically neglected novel by an author of the antebellum American South, Caroline Lee Hentz, and it inserts the author's compelling treatment of domestic violence into the overall project's exploration of horizontally aligned kinship in American cultural and literary history. During the period of the NEH Summer Stipend, I will research rare archival materials that have been little investigated by scholars, and I will develop this final, pivotal chapter of my book manuscript.