Epilogue

Abstract

I have been arguing that the American claimant, in nineteenth-century British and American culture, embodied a tension between innovation and tradition. Moreover, to focus on such claimants, relatives who are also strangers, exposes unexpected kinships amongst texts. Filaments once ran between—of imagery, and associations, and ideas—but not all of them survive: they become visible only when scatterlings assemble, as some have done in this book. Claimants invoke the restitutive teleology of romance; they can confirm identity, assert authority, demand justice, or narrate a process of transmission. Over a very long period, the idea has helped writers, editors, artists, and students choose an inheritance and decide on a legacy, defining who they are and who they wish to be....