American Enchantment: Rituals of the People in the Post-Revolutionary WorldBeautiful Deceptions: European Aesthetics, the Early American Novel, and Illusionist Art

Abstract

Book Review| March 01 2020 American Enchantment: Rituals of the People in the Post-Revolutionary WorldBeautiful Deceptions: European Aesthetics, the Early American Novel, and Illusionist Art American Enchantment: Rituals of the People in the Post-Revolutionary World. By Sizemore, Michelle. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 2017. ix, 240 pp. Cloth, $74.00; e-book, $66.72.Beautiful Deceptions: European Aesthetics, the Early American Novel, and Illusionist Art. By Schweighauser, Philipp. Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press. 2016. xi, 251 pp. Cloth, $45.00; e-book, $45.00. David Faflik David Faflik David Faflik is professor of English at the University of Rhode Island. A specialist in nineteenth-century American literature and culture, he is the author of Boarding Out: Inhabiting the American Urban Literary Imagination, 1840–1860 (2012), Melville and the Question of Meaning (2018), Urban Formalism: The Work of City Reading (2020), and Transcendental Heresies: Harvard and the Modern American Practice of Unbelief (2020). His current research focuses on the literary forms and cultural functions of the gift book in early America. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2020) 92 (1): 151–153. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8056616 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation David Faflik; American Enchantment: Rituals of the People in the Post-Revolutionary WorldBeautiful Deceptions: European Aesthetics, the Early American Novel, and Illusionist Art. American Literature 1 March 2020; 92 (1): 151–153. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8056616 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search However much they might differ in their receptiveness to a criticism that has been updated to reflect a special attunement, say, to aestheticism, historicism, emotionalism, or (post)secularism, increasing ranks of today’s readers would appear to agree on this: the time is right for a change in our critical attitudes, in the mindsets and the moods with which we approach our critical labors. Representative in this regard are two recent works that examine the experiments in literary fiction that characterized the early national period of a nascent United States. The root assumption of one of these studies—that politics is both the proper topic and the obvious source of significance for the young republic’s literature—marks a contested point of critical inquiry in the other.As for the former of these works, American Enchantment aligns itself with commentators like Christopher Castiglia, Nancy Bentley, and Rita... Copyright © 2020 by Duke University Press2020 You do not currently have access to this content.