...John Funchion Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature . By Paul Downes . Cambridge : Cambridge Univ. Press . 2015 . xiii, 297 pp. Cloth , $103.00 ; e-book, $82.00 . Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America . By Stacey Margolis . Cambridge...

... unachievable and insatiable desires for and fantasies of an ethnically cleansed America that never was. But as Funchion and Kennedy articulate for us, that absence is part of the antagonistic allure of the past. The object of these nationalistic desires is not some placid prestige of whiteness but a violent...