Landscape and Ideology in American Renaissance Literature: Topographies of Skepticism

ISBN-13: 9780521830645 / Angielski / Twarda / 2003 / 180 str.

Robert E. Abrams; Albert Gelpi; Ross Posnock

Opis

Robert Abrams argues that new concepts of space and landscape emerged in mid-nineteenth-century American writing, marking a linguistic and interpretative limit to American expansion. Abrams supports the radical elements of antebellum writing, where writers from Hawthorne to Rebecca Harding Davis disputed the naturalizing discourses of mid-nineteenth century society. Whereas previous critics find in antebellum writing a desire to convert chaos into an affirmative, liberal agenda, Abrams contends that authors of the 1840s and 50s deconstructed more than they constructed.

Spis treści

Illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I. Hawthorne, Thoreau and Melville and the Diffusion of Estrangement: 1. Critiquing colonial American geography: Hawthorne's landscape of bewilderment; 2. Thoreau and the interminable journey of vision 'nearer and nearer here'; 3. Herman Melville's home cosmography: voyaging into the inscrutable interior of the American republic; Part II. Historicizing the American Vanishing Point: Indian Removal, Slavery and Class: 4. The cultural politics of American literary ambiguity; 5. Margaret Fuller's Summer on the Lakes and 'Chief Seattle's Speech': the obliquities of the geographic in-between; 6. The power of negative space in Douglass's autobiographies and in Davis's 'Life in Iron Mills'; Conclusion.