Posthumous America: Literary Reinventions of America at the End of the Eighteenth Century

Benjamin Hoffmann’s Posthumous America examines the literary idealization of a lost American past in the works of French writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

For writers such as John Hector St. John de Crèvecœur and Claude-François de Lezay-Marnésia, America was never more potent as a driving ideal than in its loss. Examining the paradoxical American paradise depicted in Crèvecœur’s Lettres d’un cultivateur américain (1784); the “uchronotopia”—the imaginary perfect society se...