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...

McWilliams shows how and why the epic had to be transformed from imitative narrative poetry into new, open genres.

This book considers the portrayal of the American national character in the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville.