The American Epic: Transforming a Genre, 1770 1860

ISBN-13: 9780521373227 / Angielski / Twarda / 1989 / 296 str.

Jr. John P. McWilliams

Opis

This is a thorough account of the many attempts during the 18th and 19th centuries to fashion a distinctly American epic literature from a wide range of potentially heroic New World subjects. McWilliams considers the cultural, political, and literary implications of adapting Enlightenment views of republican progress to a genre that had traditionally celebrated the greatness of warriors. He shows how and why the epic in America had to be transformed from imitative narrative poetry into the new genres of prose history (Irving, Prescott, Parkman), fictional romance (Cooper, Melville), and free verse (Whitman).

Recenzje

"McWilliams surveys the work of Barlow, Dwight, and Trumbull with a sharp eye toward the rhetorical work each must perform introducing his epic to the public, revealing the discomforts each feels in suiting vehicle to message." David S. Shields, The Eighteenth Century

Spis treści

Introduction; Part I. Imitations: Homer's Tyrannous Eye: 1. Invocations; 2. Freedom's heroes; 3. Freedom's fools; 4. A white achilles for the West?; Part II. Transformations: The Epic in New Genres: 5. Red Achilles, red Satan; 6. The destroying angel; 7. Till a better epic comes along; 8. 'An epic of democracy?'; Prospect; Notes; Index.