Writing Revolution : Aesthetics and Politics in Hawthorne, Whitman and Thoreau

ISBN-13: 9780820323923 / Angielski

Peter J. Bellis

Opis

In recent years, formalist and deconstructive approaches to literary studies have been under attack, charged by critics with isolating texts as distinctive aesthetic or linguistic objects, separate from their social and historical contexts. Historicist and cultural approaches have often responded by simply reversing the picture, reducing texts to no more than superstructural effects of historical or ideological forces. In Writing Revolution, Peter J. Bellis explores the ways in which literature can engage with - rather than escape from or obscure - social and political issues. Bellis argues that a number of nineteenth-century American writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, saw their texts as spaces where alternative social and cultural possibilities could be suggested and explored. All writing in the same historical moment, Bellis's subjects were responding to the same cluster of issues: the need to redefine American identity after the Revolution, the problem of race slavery, and the growing industrialization of American society. Hawthorne, Bellis contends, sees the romance as neutral territory where the Imaginary and the Actual - the aesth