Re-Interpretations of Nineteenth- Century American Literature

Abstract

Joy S. Kasson. Artistic Voyages: Europe and the American Imagination in the Works of Irving, Allston, Cole, Cooper, and Hawthorne. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982.206 pp. Linden Peach. British Influence on the Birth of American Literature. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982. 218 + xi pp. Donald A. Ringe. American Gothic : Imagination and Reason in Nineteenth- Century Fiction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982.215 + vii pp. John Carlos Rowe. Through the Custom-House-. Nineteenth-Century American Fiction and Modem Theory. Baltimore: Johns-Hopkins University Press, 1982. 218 + xiii pp. William H. Shurr. Rappaccini's Children : American Writers in a Calvinist World. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 1981.165 pp. A decade ago the scholar interested in nineteenth-century American literature and intellectual history would often begin with such works as F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance, R. W. B. Lewis' The American Adam and Charles Fiedelson's Symbolism and American Literature. Using a technique that combined literary analysis with the history of ideas, these studies attempted to view American literature as a field rather than simply as a collection of works by different authors. The scholar writing today might still use this approach, but in the last few years many studies have appeared that offer a greater degree of sophistication in their appraisals of American literature. Scholars have studied politics and literature, history and literature, art and literature, and other fields; most of these books have brought new attention to hitherto neglected areas of American prose and poetry. Five recent critical studies—Linden Peach's British Influence on the Birth of American Literature, Donald A. Ringe's American Gothic, Joy S. Kasson's Artistic Voyages, William H. Shurr's Rappaccini's Children and John Carlos Rowe's Through the Custom-House—present various innovative approaches that form, in effect, a series of re-interpretations of nineteenth-century American literature in an intellectual context.