In The Troubled Union: Expansionist Imperatives in Post-Reconstruction American Novels, John Mor獺n Gonz獺lez traces the imperialist imaginings behind literary efforts to reunite the
United States after the trauma of the Civil War and Reconstruction. This innovative study explores how the U.S. historical romance attempted to rebuild a national identity by renovating
Manifest Destiny for the twentieth-century imperialist future through courtship and marriage plots. Yet even as these literary romances promised expansive national futures, the racial and
gender contradictions of U.S. democracy threatened to result in troubled unions at home and fractious ventures abroad. Canonical authors such as Henry James, popular authors such as Helen
Hunt Jackson, and rediscovered authors such as Mar穩a Amparo Ruiz de Burton provide the dramatic narratives examined in this book.
Employing theoretical perspectives drawn from American Studies and Latin American Studies, Gonz獺lez highlights the importance of the “domestic”—understood as both the domestic boundaries of
the nation and of the home—as a key site within civil society that maintained and renewed imperialist national subjectivities. The Troubled Union combines the formal analysis of
literary genre with interdisciplinary cultural studies to elucidate just how the imperial national allegory deeply structured the U.S. cultural imagination of the late nineteenth century.
