rdf-syntax-grammar
mods:
  schema location: http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
  title info:
    title: Berserk violence, racial vengeance, and settler colonialism in American writing from Franklin to Melville
  name:
    name part: Watts, Edward
    name part: 1964-
    role:
      role term: creator
    role:
      role term: author.
  type of resource: text
  genre: bibliography
  origin info:
    place:
      place term: nyu
    date issued: 2025
    copyright date: 2025
    issuance: monographic
  language:
    language term: eng
  physical description:
    form: print
    extent: xi, 240 pages ; 25 cm.
  abstract: Berserk Violence, Racial Vengeance, and Settler Colonialism in American Writing from Franklin to Melville studies the literary and cultural tradition of the “Indian Hater” in American writing from the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. In dozens of short stories, novels, poems, plays and historical publications, Indian Haters were white settlers on the western frontier who to kill all “Indians” to avenge the deaths of family members at the hands of a few. As they engage their episodes in racial violence, they attain transcendent racial powers based in traditions of historical white barbarism and the powers of the legendary berserker, the crazed Nordic super-warrior. Indian Haters' obsession with genocidal retribution reflected and participated in important conversations in the new nation about race, violence, nation and masculinity, as well as the role of the emergent mass print culture in the distribution of propaganda, disinformation and misrepresentation. At the same time, many authors used Indian Haters to represent the moral failure of the new nation, profoundly critiquing its ambitions and assumptions. Using theories and methods drawn from studies of settler colonialism, nationalism, media, sociology, trauma and literary history, Edward Watts excavates dozens of long-lost Indian Hater accounts, as well as better known ones from Benjamin Franklin, Charles Brockden Brown, James Hall, Robert Montgomery Bird and Herman Melville to tell the story of a story, and how that story exposes the complex machinations of the role of print culture's interactions with the violence of settler colonialism.
  note: Edward Watts.
  note: Includes bibliographical references and index.
  subject:
    geographic code: n-us---
  subject:
    topic: American literature
    temporal: 1783-1850
    topic: History and criticism
  subject:
    topic: Imperialism in literature
  subject:
    topic: Settler colonialism
    geographic: United States
    topic: History
  subject:
    topic: Indians, Treatment of
    geographic: United States
    topic: History
  classification: PS208 .W37 2025
  classification: 810.9355
  related item:
    title info:
      title: Oxford studies in American literary history
  identifier: 9780198958796
  identifier: 019895879X
  identifier: 9780198958819
  identifier: 2024952700
  record info:
    record content source: DLC
    record creation date: 241220
    record change date: 20260710141412.0
    record identifier: in00005673627