...Jonathan Levin By Carrie Tirado Bramen. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press. 2000. 380 pp.$45.00. 2003 218 American Literature The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for National Distinctive...

...Cynthia J. Davis American Niceness: A Cultural History . By Carrie Tirado Bramen . Cambridge, MA : Harvard Univ. Press . 2017 . 368 pp. Cloth, $ 45.00 . Mania for Freedom: American Literatures of Enthusiasm from the Revolution to the Civil War . By John Mac Kilgore...

... ways of thinking, Bramen makes a valuable contribu- tion to our understanding of the multivalence of one of the defining values of American exceptionalism. Jonathan Levin, Fordham University...

... attentiveness to difference 57 Although Mehta is skeptical of ‘‘the fallacy of the possible middle Carrie Bramen suggests there may be room for mediating between identitarian and humanist politics, indeed for not seeing them as nec- essarily at odds. Asserting that the extremes of modern multicultural...

... on using representative details to delineate the geographic regions of America. When Carrie Tirado Bramen (2000, 119) writes that “regionalism did for geography what the hyphen did for ethnicity: it linked a subculture with a national identity”; when Richard Brodhead (1993, 115) claims...

... set on the sphere of great lit- erature), Carrie Tirado Bramen’s The Uses of Variety: Modern American- ism and the Quest for National Distinctiveness (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2000...

... thanks are due to Dave Alff for useful feedback and generous readings of nearly every draft of this essay. For their feedback and encouragement, I would also like to thank Carrie Tirado Bramen, James Holstun, Claire Tranchino, and Joanna Weymouth. 1 Two excellent introductions to the New Puritan...

..., and revision. Worldliness hinges on seeing oneself as a judge with an impediment. University of Colorado-Denver Notes Ken Dauber, Stacy Hubbard, Carrie Tirado Bramen, Neil Schmitz, Deidre Lynch, Nancy Glazener, Wai Chee Dimock, John Plotz, Jonathan Grossman, and Julie Crawford all read portions...