The Biglow Papers

The Biglow Papers PDF Author: James Russell Lowell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Mexican War, 1846-1848
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Get Book Here

Book Description

The Biglow Papers

The Biglow Papers PDF Author: James Russell Lowell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Mexican War, 1846-1848
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Get Book Here

Book Description


Beneath the American Renaissance

Beneath the American Renaissance PDF Author: David S. Reynolds
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199976406
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 656

Get Book Here

Book Description
The award-winning Beneath the American Renaissance is a classic work on American literature. It immeasurably broadens our knowledge of our most important literary period, as first identified by F.O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance. With its combination of sharp critical insight, engaging observation, and narrative drive, it represents the kind of masterful cultural history for which David Reynolds is known. Here the major works of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Dickinson receive striking, original readings set against the rich backdrop of contemporary popular writing. Now back in print, the volume includes a new foreword by historian Sean Wilentz that reveals the book's impact and influence. A magisterial work of criticism and cultural history, Beneath the American Renaissance will fascinate anyone interested in the genesis of America's most significant literary epoch and the iconic figures who defined it.

Reconstituting the American Renaissance

Reconstituting the American Renaissance PDF Author: Jay Grossman
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822384531
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book Here

Book Description
Challenging the standard periodization of American literary history, Reconstituting the American Renaissance reinterprets the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman and the relationship of these two authors to each other. Jay Grossman argues that issues of political representation—involving vexed questions of who shall speak and for whom—lie at the heart of American political and literary discourse from the revolutionary era through the Civil War. By taking the mid-nineteenth-century period, traditionally understood as marking the advent of literary writing in the United States, and restoring to it the ways in which Emerson and Whitman engaged with eighteenth-century controversies, rhetorics, and languages about political representation, Grossman departs significantly from arguments that have traditionally separated American writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Reconstituting the American Renaissance describes how Emerson and Whitman came into the period of their greatest productivity with different conceptions of the functions and political efficacy of the word in the world. It challenges Emerson’s position as Whitman’s necessary precursor and offers a cultural history that emphasizes the two writers’ differences in social class, cultural experience, and political perspective. In their writings between 1830 and 1855, the book finds contrasting conceptions of the relations between the “representative man” and the constituencies to whom, and for whom, he speaks. Reconstituting the American Renaissance opens up the canonical relationship between Emerson and Whitman and multiplies the historical and discursive contexts for understanding their published and unpublished works.

Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance

Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance PDF Author: George Monteiro
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813157013
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Get Book Here

Book Description
"A poem is best read in the light of all the other poems ever written." So said Robert Frost in instructing readers on how to achieve poetic literacy. George Monteiro's newest book follows that dictum to enhance our understanding of Frost's most valuable poems by demonstrating the ways in which they circulate among the constellations of great poems and essays of the New England Renaissance. Monteiro reads Frost's own poetry not against "all the other poems ever written" but in the light of poems and essays by his precursors, particularly Emerson, Thoreau, and Dickinson. Familiar poems such as "Mending Wall," "After Apple-Picking," "Birches," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "The Road Not Taken," and "Mowing," as well as lesser known poems such as "The Draft Horse," "The Ax-Helve," "The Bonfire," "Dust of Snow," "A Cabin in the Clearing," "The Cocoon," and "Pod of the Milkweed," are renewed by fresh and original readings that show why and how these poems pay tribute to their distinguished sources. Frost's insistence that Emerson and Thoreau were the giants of nineteenth-century American letters is confirmed by the many poems, variously influenced, that derive from them. His attitude toward Emily Dickinson, however, was more complex and sometimes less generous. In his twenties he molded his poetry after hers. But later, after he joined the faculty of Amherst College, he found her to be less a benefactor than a competitor. Monteiro tells a two-stranded tale of attraction, imitation, and homage countered by competition, denigration, and grudging acceptance of Dickinson's greatness as a woman poet. In a daring move, he composes—out of Frost's own words and phrases—the talk on Emily Dickinson that Frost was never invited to give. In showing how Frost's work converses with that of his predecessors, Monteiro gives us a new Frost whose poetry is seen as the culmination of an intensely felt New England literary experience.

The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Renaissance

The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Renaissance PDF Author: Christopher N. Phillips
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108372813
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book Here

Book Description
The American Renaissance has been a foundational concept in American literary history for nearly a century. The phrase connotes a period, as well as an event, an iconic turning point in the growth of a national literature and a canon of texts that would shape American fiction, poetry, and oratory for generations. F. O. Matthiessen coined the term in 1941 to describe the years 1850–1855, which saw the publications of major writings by Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. This Companion takes up the concept of the American Renaissance and explores its origins, meaning, and longevity. Essays by distinguished scholars move chronologically from the formative reading of American Renaissance authors to the careers of major figures ignored by Matthiessen, including Stowe, Douglass, Harper, and Longfellow. The volume uses the best of current literary studies, from digital humanities to psychoanalytic theory, to illuminate an era that reaches far beyond the Civil War and continues to shape our understanding of American literature.

American Renaissance

American Renaissance PDF Author: F. O. Matthiessen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199726884
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 722

Get Book Here

Book Description
Studies the views of 5 prominent mid-19th century writers on the function and nature of literature and how they applied these views to their works.

The Representation of the Self in the American Renaissance

The Representation of the Self in the American Renaissance PDF Author: Jeffrey Steele
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description
Using the theories of Nietzche, Freud, Jung, and Lacan--as well as the critical insights of Derrida, Iser, Ricoeur, and others--Steele explains how Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Margaret Fuller attempted to influence readers by promoting psychological myths that functioned as ontological paradigms. She also shows that the Transcendentalist myths of the psyche are most fully revealed in the works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville. Originally published in 1987. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Above the American Renaissance

Above the American Renaissance PDF Author: Harold Karl Bush
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781625343604
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Above the American Renaissance takes David S. Reynolds's classic study Beneath the American Renaissance as a model and a provocation to consider how language and concepts broadly defined as spiritual are essential to understanding nineteenth-century American literary culture. In the 1980s, Reynolds's scholarship and methodology enlivened investigations of religious culture, and since then, for reasons that include a rising respect for interdisciplinarity and the aftershocks of the 9/11 attacks, religion in literature has become a major area of inquiry for Americanists. In essays that reconsider and contextualize Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, Abraham Lincoln, and others, this volume captures the vibrancy of spiritual considerations in American literary studies and points a way forward within literary and spiritual investigations. In addition to the editors and David S. Reynolds, contributors include Jeffrey Bilbro, Dawn Coleman, Jonathan A. Cook, Tracy Fessenden, Zachary Hutchins, Richard Kopley, Mason I. Lowance Jr., John Matteson, Christopher N. Phillips, Vivian Pollak, Michael Robertson, Gail K. Smith, Claudia Stokes, and Timothy Sweet.

European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance

European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance PDF Author: Larry J. Reynolds
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300042429
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
Political issues and events have always acted as a catalyst on thought and art. In this pioneering study, Larry J. Reynolds argues that the European revolutions of 1848-49 quickened the American literary imagination and shaped the characters, plots, and themes of the American renaissance. He traces the impact of the revolutions on Emerson, Fuller, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Thoreau, showing that the upheavals abroad both inspired and disturbed. Extraordinarily well informed and creative treatment of the influences of the 1848-49 European revolutions on writers of the American Renaissance...The book is especially effective in providing a historical context for reading major writings. It demonstrates influences at work at a number of levels and presents historical narrative and subtle readings of literary texts with equal clarity. Highly recommended.- Choice

The Routledge Introduction to American Renaissance Literature

The Routledge Introduction to American Renaissance Literature PDF Author: Larry J. Reynolds
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781315751627
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Examining the most frequently taught works by key writers of the American Renaissance, including Poe, Emerson, Fuller, Douglass, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Jacobs, Stowe, Whitman, and Dickinson, this engaging and accessible book offers the crucial historical, social, and political contexts in which they must be studied. Larry J. Reynolds usefully groups authors together for more lively and fruitful discussion and engages with current as well as historical theoretical debates on the area. The book includes essential biographical and historical information to situate and contextualise the literature, and incorporates major relevant criticism into each chapter. Recommended readings for further study, along with a list of works cited, concludes each chapter"--