The Complicity of Imagination: The American Renaissance, Contests of Authority, and Seventeenth-Century English Culture

Abstract

1. Cultural predicaments and authorial responses 2. A Seraph's Eloquence: Emerson's inspired language and Milton's apocalyptic prose 3. Margaret Fuller's The Two Herberts: Emerson and the disavowal of sequestered virtue 4. As If a Green Bough were Laid Across the Page: Thoreau's seventeenth-century landscapes and extravagant personae 5. Melville's Mardi and Moby-Dick: marvelous travel narratives, and seventeenth-century methods of inquiry 6. Surmising the infidel: Melville reads Milton.