Reflections on social engineering and settler-American literature.

This article focuses on the nationalist constructions that have influenced American identity and attempts to discern the resonances that these modes might produce in literary creation. To engage this topic, the inquiry first examines the multilateral influences on the formation of collective identity through attention to governmental and political social engineering; and, second, the article explores the progression of the historiographic imaging and imagining of cultural proprietorship of the America continent as it has been projected through cultural media. The aim is to characterize the structures that place a contrived primordialism in the image of specific population demographics and to explore the attendant literary and cultural expressions of this phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]