American Renaissance Research Articles

Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative by Hershel Parker (review)

Reviewed by: Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative by Hershel Parker John Matteson HERSHEL PARKER Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012. xix + 587 pp. Book reviews, like biographies, should never be about the people who write them. However, the book under review metes out extremely harsh treatment to two American Renaissance scholars of wide reputation, Andrew Delbanco and Brenda Wineapple, with regard to whom a brief disclosure feels appropriate. Professor Delbanco was the second reader on my dissertation. Professor Wineapple was the director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography while I was there as a resident fellow. Both of them have been kind to me in my career, and I consider them my friends. I do not believe that those relationships have influenced my commentary on Parker’s book, but the reader is entitled to some candor on this point. It is likely impossible for anyone to read Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative without experiencing strong feelings. For the person with an independent knowledge of the subjects on which Parker’s massive and erudite volume touches, it is also impossible to read without profoundly mixed emotions, for it is a book that combines the highest standards of scholarship with reckless expressions of pettiness and professional rancor. Having previously given us the indispensable two-volume Herman Melville: A Biography (Hopkins), Parker now offers still more fascinating material on his inexhaustible subject. The third and final section of his book adds details and side narratives that Parker could not fit into the biography, as well as emendations based on subsequent discoveries. But in Melville Biography he also gives us a great deal of himself. The book is as much a personal memoir as a scholarly addendum to the biographer’s contributions to our knowledge of Melville. It takes us on the long and winding road of Parker’s development as a scholar, more or less beginning with a months-long struggle with tuberculosis at the age of twenty, during which the author read Shakespeare’s plays over and over again: Hamlet ten times; King John, seven. We discover that Parker’s biography of Melville had its genesis long before the author was aware that he was being led toward biography. The process began in the early 1960s, when Parker, only in his mid-to-late twenties, accepted three successive offers from [End Page 83] über-scholar Harrison Hayford: first to edit Moby-Dick as Doubloon: Essays and Extracts (1851–1970), next to co-edit the Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick, and finally to become Associate General Editor of The Writings of Herman Melville for Northwestern-Newberry. Parker’s approach to scholarship is powerfully grounded in archival research and in, as he puts it, “the fact which stirs the biographer to responsible imagination” (140). Though Parker decided to write Herman Melville long after he began his association with Hayford, biography as he has practiced it has been a focused, lifelong pursuit, demanding formidable sacrifices of time and treasure. Parker is highly unusual among current biographers in that his whole energies have been devoted to telling the story of a single subject. Even Robert A. Caro, who has given nearly forty years and counting to writing the definitive Lyndon Johnson biography, warmed up with a book on Robert Moses. Parker argues correctly that the ideal biographer “should be omnivorous, omnipresent, immortal, and strong as a horse” (164). He believes as a matter of conscience that excellent scholarship derives only from work, work, and more work. The most gifted literary thinker, Parker maintains, will fail if he or she has not “year after year, soiled his or her own hands in devoted labor in the archives” (5). For Parker, however, digging in the archives is not a soiling at all, but a holy immersion. He writes, with no intended hyperbole, “There is something sacred about the search for something closer to the truth of Melville’s life” (240). Conversely, ignorance or avoidance of the historical record is nothing less than a sin: “disregarding or distorting the history of scholarship is a violation of morality” (300; his emphasis). The expectations to which Parker holds the scholar are, to say the...

Imagic Moments: Indigenous North American Film LeeSchweninger. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013.

Imagic Moments: Indigenous North American Film Lee Schweninger. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013.English professor Lee Schweninger is concerned with issues of indigenous self-representation and resistance in contemporary American film. Schweninger employs Barry Barclay's term, Fourth Cinema (4), to describe in which the camera is owned and controlled by the culture(s) depicted in the filmic narrative. Given the history of American and the ways in which have been represented, it is understandable that he believes fervently that Indian roles should be played by Indians (5). Schweninger focuses his study on fifteen films produced over the past half century, continuing to argue the importance of setting films in the current era and with as major characters, thereby undermining the previously dominant trope of the 'Vanishing Indian.'Schweninger accurately notes the historic significance of Smoke Signals (1998) due to its author screenwriter (Sherman Alexie), director (Chris Eyre), and major characters (Adam Beach, Evan Adams, Irene Bedard, Gary Farmer), as pivotal moment in the history of American (18). More problematic is his discussion of House Made of Dawn (1972). Although the 1968 Scott Momaday novel was a linchpin in what is now commonly called the Native American renaissance, the enjoyed only several screenings to small audiences. Momaday complained that the film has never been distributed (51), while scholars note that viewing a copy of the is virtually impossible unless one has access to one of only a few university video libraries. Given its limited distribution, it is difficult to ascribe to it the importance or influence that Schweninger implies.There are noteworthy and well-substantiated contentions throughout the text that will alter the parameters of studies, including the disturbing observation that generally, Hollywood has disallowed interracial relationships to survive the end of the (108). He then supports that contention by citing The Vanishing American (1925), Laughing Boy (1934), The Searchers (1956), A Man Called Horse (1970), and Little Big Man (1970).Schweninger provides a sensitive and compelling evaluation of Powwow Highway (1989, adapted from David Seals's 1979 novel), proudly noting that although it is directed by non-Native Jonathan Wacks, Wes Studi (Cherokee) plays Budd, and Gary Farmer (Cayuga) plays Philbert Bono. …

O quinteto da Renascença americana no Brasil

This survey provides extensive bibliographical data on the works by the five authors who shaped the so-called American Renaissance, which have been translated into Portuguese and published as book in Brazil until the present day. It has as its purpose to be useful as a sort of archive for ulterior researchers, who will be able to find here many primary data which were until now scattered among several sources.

A Political companion to Herman Melville

Herman Melville is widely considered to be one of America's greatest authors, and countless literary theorists and critics have studied his life and work. However, political theorists have tended to avoid Melville, turning rather to such contemporaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau to understand the political thought of the American Renaissance. While Melville was not an activist in the traditional sense and his philosophy is notoriously difficult to categorize, his work is nevertheless deeply political in its own right. As editor Jason Frank notes in his introduction to A Political Companion to Herman Melville, Melville's writing strikes a note of dissonance in the pre-established harmonies of the American political tradition. This unique volume explores Melville's politics by surveying the full range of his work-from Typee (1846) to the posthumously published Billy Budd (1924). The contributors give historical context to Melville's writings and place him in conversation with political and theoretical debates, examining his relationship to transcendentalism and contemporary continental philosophy and addressing his work's relevance to topics such as nineteenth-century imperialism, twentieth-century legal theory, the anti-rent wars of the 1840s, and the civil rights movement. From these analyses emerges a new and challenging portrait of Melville as a political thinker of the first order, one that will establish his importance not only for nineteenth-century American political thought but also for political theory more broadly.

Jeffrey Einboden, Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature in Middle Eastern Languages

Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature in Middle Eastern Languages by Jeffrey Einboden, proposes to study the translations of some authors of the American Renaissance (Longfellow, Irving, Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman) into Hebrew, Arabic and Persian, between 1900 and 1976, and to explore the literary, historical, political, and linguistic implications of these translations by prominent Middle Eastern writers. The choice of the corpus is justified by the fact that these American writers have pl...

Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America Righteous Violence: Revolution, Slavery, and the American Renaissance

Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America Righteous Violence: Revolution, Slavery, and the American Renaissance

“Annie Does Not Love the Monkeys”: Hawthorne, Irony, and Childhood Innocence

Thanks to scholars such as Michael Colacurcio, Nina Baym and David Reynolds, it is now considered very old fashioned and naive to imagine Hawthorne quietly engaged in the drawing rooms of his prefaces and introductions, existing in the imaginative play of light and shadow, unconnected to the actual bustling nineteenth-century world he inhabited. Instead, all three of these scholars have convincingly argued that Hawthorne fashioned his writing career based on and in response to popular writers or topics of the day. Hawthorne's engagement with the Actual in all its complexities is especially evident in a long ignored sketch, "Little Annie's Ramble," that was originally published in Youth's Keepsake in 1835 and subsequently included in Twice-Told Tales in 1837. Particularly, Hawthorne's inclusion of a caravan or menagerie, a fairly recent development of popular culture in North America at that time, prompts a much needed re-evaluation of the sketch, both for the ways in which it documents this entertainment as well as how Hawthorne's use of the show reveals hitherto unrecognized aspects of Annie and the narrator. Annie's attendance at a caravan and Hawthorne's ironic treatment of the narrator call into question the ascendant ideology of sentimental childhood. Nathaniel Hawthorne opens "Little Annie's Ramble" with the town crier's announcement of the arrival of a caravan or menagerie. The unnamed narrator sees Annie on her doorstep longing to attend the show and he invites her to accompany him. Together they stroll around the corner and view a street clogged with vehicles and then pass a series of shop windows: a dry-goods shop, a jeweler, a hardware store, a bakery, a bookseller, and a toy store. In the throng of Main Street, the narrator comments on the animals in view--caged and domestic animals including a canary, a parrot, and a squirrel as well as a dog and a cat. The narrator and Annie enter the caravan or menagerie and view an elephant, a lion and lioness, a tiger, a wolf, a black bear, a polar bear, monkeys, and a monkey riding a pony. The narrator and Annie then return to the street where they hear the town-crier announcing a lost child. The narrator quickly identifies Annie as the lost child and they hurry homeward to alleviate the fears of Annie's mother. Twentieth-century critics, if they paid attention at all, tended to mention the sketch in passing, dismissing it as conventional sentimentality. Even in studies that focus on Hawthorne's early career, the sketch rarely merits a passing remark. For example, Neal Frank Doubleday in Hawthornes Early Tales does not even mention the story. Nina Baym in The Shape of Hawthornes Career devotes a sentence to the sketch. One possible motive for critics' inattention to the sketch could be its publication in Youth's Keepsake, a gift annual the title of which suggests an audience of children. Because Hawthorne disparagingly referred to his own writing for children, (1) critics have likely felt some justification in setting aside work for which the author seemed to have little respect. In fact, the editors of the Centenary Edition remark that "Little Annie's Ramble" is "yet another example of the lovingly sentimental hackwork that from the outset he [Hawthorne] was willing to undertake in order to make his way as a writer" (Pearce et al., 6:288). And Laura Laffrado, in the one book-length study of Hawthorne's writing for children, repeats the characterization of the sketch as sentimental and implies it is beneath critical attention by ignoring it (1). This is not exactly a ringing endorsement for serious attention to the sketch. Sentimentality continued to be the grounds for explicit dismissal in Beneath the American Renaissance, in which David Reynolds lumps "Little Annie's Ramble" in with several other early sketches that perpetrate such nineteenth-century values as "simplified piety, patriotic history, comforting angelic visions, domestic bliss, and regenerating childhood purity" (114). …

Conversations with Remarkable Native Americans by Jolle Rostkowski (review)

NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 Reviews 125 CAROLINE LAURENT Conversations with Remarkable Native Americans by Joëlle Rostkowski State University of New York Press, 2012 JOËLLE ROSTKOWSKI is a French ethnohistorian who teaches at the School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris and is a consultant at the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). She won the 2002 French Academy History Prize for her book Native American Renaissance: A Century of Reconquests. She conducted interviews with­ Native people she has met over the years and selected sixteen of them for this book. Whether they are writers, policy advocates, lawyers, painters (such as Tony Abeyta), journalists, or politicians, all these Native people are leaders in their own special field, using their personal talents to advance the cause of a whole people. The diversity of careers is one of the great assets of the book. Despite this multiplicity of roles, there is a homogeneity in character and purpose: these Indian figures are all extremely strong and notably committed to defending their people’s (hi)stories and existence. One of the interviewees is Gerald Vizenor, the Ojibwe writer, literary critic, professor, and ethnographer from the White Earth Nation who has written more than thirty books. This very charismatic gentleman writes about “survivance ,” which he defines as “the political and ecstatic courage of resistance over the mundane themes of victimry.” He talks about the sense of Native presence over absence and nihility. He insists on reacquiring history as it was experienced by Indian people and expressing it as Indians, not as Americans. The Cherokee and Muscogee poet and writer Suzan Harjo is also a curator and a policy advocate who has helped Native Americans recover more than a million acres of land. She served as the executive director of the NCAI (National Congress of American Indians) from 1984 to 1989. She firmly believes in intertribal cooperation in order to improve Indians’ status in the United States. This woman is a spirit warrior from whom people can definitely find inspiration. Another very strong and inspiring woman is the current tribal chair of the White Earth Nation, Erma Vizenor, the first woman to lead the largest tribe in Minnesota. She was elected in 2004, promoting fairness, transparency, and stability in tribal government. In 1991, she took a stand against corruption after some elders came to ask for her help, and she was put into jail after a takeover of the tribal headquarters, which started the five-year reform Reviews NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 126 movement known as Camp Justice. This action led to the conviction and imprisonment of the tribal chairman and two tribal council members. Vizenor has always taken risks to fight for justice and reform and hers is a great example of women’s empowerment. Robert T. Coulter (Potawatomi) is an attorney and the founder of the Indian Law Resource Center, a nonprofit law firm specializing in the concrete defense of Indian rights at the national and international levels. He was instrumental in the creation of the UNDRIP (United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples), as he followed the steps of Deskaheh in asking for international help. According to him, “what is most important is that the United States stops doing the things that it is apologizing for.” Having legal experts from Indian Country is a wonderful asset to all tribes, and Indian Law programs are developing around the States, which is a very positive­evolution. Kenneth Deer is a Mohawk journalist and educator, and also a United Nations Indigenous representative and the editor of The Eastern Door, an award-winning, independent Mohawk newspaper. Deer argues that “efforts to assimilate Indigenous peoples into mainstream society and eliminate our legitimate right to exist as peoples continue to plague us. It seems our destiny is to continue to struggle to survive. . . . If we ever stop struggling, then we will disappear.” For him, the fight for Indian rights and survival is far from over and will have to go on for as long as Natives will be able and willing to fight. The variety of characters in this book is precious in itself because it does not limit...

The fiction of America: performance and the cultural imaginary in literature and film

The Fiction of juxtaposes classic literature of the American Renaissance with twentieth-century popular culture-pairing, for instance, Ralph Waldo Emerson with Finding Nemo, Walt Whitman with Spider-man, and Hester Prynne with Madonna - to investigate how the Americanness of American culture constitutes itself in the interplay of the cultural imaginary and performance. Conceptualizing America as a transhistorical practice, Susanne Hamscha reveals disruptive, spectral moments in the narrative of America that confront American culture with its inherent inconsistencies.

POE AND THE REMAPPING OF ANTEBELLUM PRINT CULTURE

POE AND THE REMAPPING OF ANTEBELLUM PRINT CULTURE. Ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Jerome McGann. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2012. vii + 271 pp. $45.Since the impact of F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) on the academic study of American literature in the 1950s and 1960s, scholars in the last three decades have debated Matthiessen's criteria for inclusion, his nearly exclusive focus on five major authors (three from New England and two from New York), and the writers excluded from his overall discussion. Notable by his absence in American Renaissance was Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), who represented to Matthiessen the tragic consequences of isolation, a contrast to those writers who consciously or unconsciously confronted a larger social world. If Walt Whitman's poetry represented engagement with the ordinary experiences of the common man, Poe's works, according to Matthiessen, suggested an escape from such concerns, a retreat into a realm out of space and out of time. body of Poe's writings represented the trappings of an abnormal Romantic temperament, a horror and anxiety generated by a tortured sensibility.Several of the contributors of the ten essays in Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture invoke Matthiessen or use his work as a point of departure. Maurice Lee, in particular, does so with a hint of weariness. He duly cites the number of Matthiessen-influenced works-from American Renaissance Reconsidered (1985), edited by Donald Pease and Walter Benn Michaels, and David Reynolds's Beneath the American Renaissance (1988) to more recent studies. He notes, however, that Matthiessen, when currently cited, represents a once-dominant tradition of scholarly inquiry that examined a more manageable canon at a time of an apparent scholarly consensus. Pointing to Poe's critical neglect, according to Lee, seems less compelling today, and his own essay, via a numerical accounting, shows that academic interest in Poe remains strong and shows few signs of abating.The metaphor in the volume's title, addressed by editor J. Gerald Kennedy in his introduction, is mapping, a marker suggesting a decentralized and volatile network of writers, editors, and publishers of varied, competing, and often antagonistic agendas and interests. It was this literary, economic, and social marketplace that Poe, the magazine editor aspiring for independence, aimed to negotiate and control. As the contributors demonstrate, however, he was often the victim of his own assertiveness and was subject to forces in the publishing milieu, most notably a vast culture of reprinting, that he failed to master.Kennedy seizes on the metaphor of mapping in his opening essay, which focuses on Poe's mixture of literary criticism and gossip, The Literati of New York City (1846). Despite acknowledgment that the series was a random selection of his New York contemporaries, the compilation constituted a fairly systematic appraisal of antebellum authors, including portraits of every person of literary note in (24). Clergymen, politicians, and scholars appeared alongside poets and fiction writers, and Poe took pains to include over two dozen editors of periodicals, fellow arbiters of literary taste. Kennedy charts the course from Poe's early Autography installments in the Southern Literary Messenger (1836), to the Autography series in Graham's Magazine in 1841-42, to the Literati. All these efforts led Poe toward a plan in the last years of his life for a more ambitious project on American authors and their literary productions. If Kennedy's essay elaborates on Burton R. Pollin's pioneering work in presenting the notes and outline for Living Writers of America (Studies in the American Renaissance, 1991), a project Poe never completed, persuasive claims are made for Poe's achievements in broadening the scope of American letters by including profiles of women writers, practitioners in a diversity of genres, and figures from different regions. …

POE AND THE REMAPPING OF ANTEBELLUM PRINT CULTURE

POE AND THE REMAPPING OF ANTEBELLUM PRINT CULTURE. Ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Jerome McGann. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2012. vii + 271 pp. $45.Since the impact of F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) on the academic study of American literature in the 1950s and 1960s, scholars in the last three decades have debated Matthiessen's criteria for inclusion, his nearly exclusive focus on five major authors (three from New England and two from New York), and the writers excluded from his overall discussion. Notable by his absence in American Renaissance was Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), who represented to Matthiessen the tragic consequences of isolation, a contrast to those writers who consciously or unconsciously confronted a larger social world. If Walt Whitman's poetry represented engagement with the ordinary experiences of the common man, Poe's works, according to Matthiessen, suggested an escape from such concerns, a retreat into a realm out of space and out of time. The body of Poe's writings represented the trappings of an abnormal Romantic temperament, a horror and anxiety generated by a tortured sensibility.Several of the contributors of the ten essays in Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture invoke Matthiessen or use his work as a point of departure. Maurice Lee, in particular, does so with a hint of weariness. He duly cites the number of Matthiessen-influenced works-from The American Renaissance Reconsidered (1985), edited by Donald Pease and Walter Benn Michaels, and David Reynolds's Beneath the American Renaissance (1988) to more recent studies. He notes, however, that Matthiessen, when currently cited, represents a once-dominant tradition of scholarly inquiry that examined a more manageable canon at a time of an apparent scholarly consensus. Pointing to Poe's critical neglect, according to Lee, seems less compelling today, and his own essay, via a numerical accounting, shows that academic interest in Poe remains strong and shows few signs of abating.The metaphor in the volume's title, addressed by editor J. Gerald Kennedy in his introduction, is mapping, a marker suggesting a decentralized and volatile network of writers, editors, and publishers of varied, competing, and often antagonistic agendas and interests. It was this literary, economic, and social marketplace that Poe, the magazine editor aspiring for independence, aimed to negotiate and control. As the contributors demonstrate, however, he was often the victim of his own assertiveness and was subject to forces in the publishing milieu, most notably a vast culture of reprinting, that he failed to master.Kennedy seizes on the metaphor of mapping in his opening essay, which focuses on Poe's mixture of literary criticism and gossip, "The Literati of New York City" (1846). Despite acknowledgment that the series was a random selection of his New York contemporaries, the compilation constituted a fairly systematic appraisal of antebellum authors, including portraits of "every person of literary note in America" (24). Clergymen, politicians, and scholars appeared alongside poets and fiction writers, and Poe took pains to include over two dozen editors of periodicals, fellow arbiters of literary taste. Kennedy charts the course from Poe's early "Autography" installments in the Southern Literary Messenger (1836), to the "Autography" series in Graham's Magazine in 1841-42, to the "Literati." All these efforts led Poe toward a plan in the last years of his life for a more ambitious project on American authors and their literary productions. If Kennedy's essay elaborates on Burton R. Pollin's pioneering work in presenting the notes and outline for The Living Writers of America (Studies in the American Renaissance, 1991), a project Poe never completed, persuasive claims are made for Poe's achievements in broadening the scope of American letters by including profiles of women writers, practitioners in a diversity of genres, and figures from different regions. …

WRITING BEYOND PROPHECY: EMERSON, HAWTHORNE, AND MELVILLE AFTER THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE

Book Review| January 01 2014 WRITING BEYOND PROPHECY: EMERSON, HAWTHORNE, AND MELVILLE AFTER THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE WRITING BEYOND PROPHECY: EMERSON, HAWTHORNE, AND MELVILLE AFTER THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCEKevorkian, Martin Robert Hughes Robert Hughes Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Resources for American Literary Study (2014) 37: 307–311. https://doi.org/10.2307/26367698 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Robert Hughes; WRITING BEYOND PROPHECY: EMERSON, HAWTHORNE, AND MELVILLE AFTER THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE. Resources for American Literary Study 1 January 2014; 37 307–311. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/26367698 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressResources for American Literary Study Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2014 AMS Press, Inc.2014AMS Press, Inc. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

WRITING BEYOND PROPHECY: EMERSON, HAWTHORNE, AND MELVILLE AFTER THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE

WRITING BEYOND PROPHECY: EMERSON, HAWTHORNE, AND MELVILLE AFTER THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE. By Martin Kevorkian. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2013. xviii + 259 pp. $45.Martin Kevorkian's book considers the religious life of three key figures of the American Renaissance: Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64), and Herman Melville (1819-91). Kevorkian proposes that these three writers, having positioned themselves outside prevailing religious orthodoxies their prime years, reconciled themselves to a more sympathetic view of conventional religious faith and the figure of the minister particular their late years.The Emerson chapter is the foundational essay Kevorkian's argument. Kevorkian claims that, after a mid-1830s crisis of faith the possibility of ministry and an early 1840s skepticism toward the practical capacity of men to reason their way out of idolatry to true religion, and after long silent years concerning religion and faith the 1840s and 1850s (61), Emerson at the end of his career-and most visibly the Worship essay of The Conduct of Life (1860)-to reconsider more generously the possibilities of a more communal aspect to spiritual and moral life. Kevorkian does a fine job reviewing Emerson's ministerial and religious crises of 1832-41. But this sketch also highlights the difficulty that Kevorkian faces trying to make the argument for Emerson's supposed shift by 1860. Emerson's religious heterodoxy was both deeply thought and deeply felt, and Kevorkian notes that, by 1840, Emerson's skepticism raged virtually unchecked (55). It is easy to imagine that this skepticism would mellow some respect, but Kevorkian's argument then faces the vexing question: What, very precisely, does this softening of intensity betoken the intellectual biography of Emerson? Kevorkian himself vacillates between two conclusions: the rather modest claim that Emerson eventually became somewhat less dismissive of conventional religion than he appeared to be 1841 and the more vigorous claim that the late Emerson reconciled himself to a more interpersonal or communal vision of the action of religious truth and subsequently returned to a more ministerial role his speaking and writing (127).The book advances two serious arguments support of its claim for the shift represented by Worship. One follows from that essay's declaration that is a leading topic the scheme of human life and that, indeed, grounds the greatness of a man and the greatness of any great age civilization (64). All of this granted, readers might still reasonably wonder what Emerson intends by the word worship. Emerson's own quotation, as given by Kevorkian, glosses its meaning as one's being in earnest, one's thoughts fixed on spiritual verities, even as one pursues greatness the world of action (20). The word thus defined, it is difficult to see Emerson's championing of worship as much of a break: earnestness of and commitment to thinking through spiritual verities were surely characteristic of Emerson even at his most radically heterodox.Kevorkian develops an argument that Worship announces Emerson's yearning for-and granting the actual possibility of-a spiritual mentor or model or master, whose superiority of holiness and moral sentiment (21) would exert an attraction undeniable even to a man so extraordinary as Emerson. Kevorkian offers evidence of Emerson's view of the desirability of such a personage by 1860 and argues that this wish constitutes a shift Emerson's thinking insofar as it departs from the solipsistic intellection that was previously Emerson's model for spiritual questing. In 1836, Emerson was conceptualizing God as the impersonal mind of the mind, the soul of the soul, the law of the laws (36), and concluding, therefore, that only the faculty of reason offered a sure way to God and religious truth, eschewing the susceptibility to failure and corruption endemic to common sense, emotion, and man's constitutional weakness for idolatrous superstition (53). …

Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance by Mark Rifkin (review)

Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance by Mark Rifkin (review)

The Voice of Nature: <em>Hope Leslie</em> and Early American Romanticism

In the preface to his 1848 anthology The Female Poets of America, Rufus Wilmot Griswold proposes as the answer to charges that Americans are much devoted to business and politics to produce a national literature (8). In the expanded preface to the second edition, published four years later, Griswold illustrates the dynamic relationship between antebellum and Romantic historiography by turning to the frontier and its narrative of American progress to make his point: [lit is in the West too where we look for what is most thoroughly and essential in American character where we are struck with the number of youthful female voices that soften and enrich the tumult of enterprise, and action, by the interblended music of a calmer and loftier sphere (8). Griswold's faith in the possibility of a national literature depends on feminine genius to represent western expansion as a native instinct, even as the transcendent properties of that genius exclude women from the political rights earned by participation in the commercial enterprise of empire building. The rhetoric of established women as the source of private virtue that naturalized civic duty but also excluded them from being considered citizens. Similarly, by establishing the frontier's wide-open spaces as the source of national character that naturalized American expansion, Romantic historiography worked to preserve rather than assimilate nature's ever-receding possibilities. Amy Kaplan has compellingly analyzed the process by which imperial domesticity relies on the construction of uncivilized spaces to continue its domesticating mission (588). Reading Catharine Maria Sedgwick's playful frontier romance Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts (1827) as an early Romantic experiment rather than as a straightforward precursor to mid-nineteenth-century domestic novels, this article traces a strain of antebellum discourse that romanticizes these uncivilized spaces as extrapolitical sources of national character. The logic of this rhetoric proposes the figures it imagines circulating in these spaces as working to naturalize culture rather than domesticate nature. I begin by situating Sedgwick in the early Romantic movement by arguing that early Romantic historiography called upon feminine genius to naturalize fantasies of progressive national history. I then argue that Hope Leslie's cyclical concept of history poses a direct challenge to Romantic historiography's reliance on the essential-izing rhetoric of domesticity. Although Sedgwick's experimental Romanticism protests the artificial confines of domesticity, it can do so only by replacing the disenfranchised white woman of domestic fiction with the forsaken Indian woman of Romantic historiography as the figure who must remain the unassimilated source of the natural values that the United States claims for itself.(1) EARLY AMERICAN ROMANTICISM AND WOMEN'S FICTION Sedgwick's selection of poetry by Eliza Lee Cabot Follen, William Cullen Bryant, and Fitz-Greene Halleck for Hope Leslie's title page and chapter epigraphs situates her novel in the context of the burgeoning New England Romantic movement. Most accounts of nineteenth-century literature would not consider these authors as part of the movement, primarily because their old-world metrical arrangements and didactic sentimentalism seem hopelessly opposed to the inventive aesthetics of midcentury American Renaissance authors. Recent critical attention has begun to view early American Romanticism's transatlantic appropriations as revisionary rather than imitative, particularly by noting the nationalist agenda behind the movement's relationship with a specifically American landscape.(2) In their appropriation of Wordsworthian naturalism, early American Romantics preserved a jarring sense of eighteenth-century didacticism. A correspondence between the moral and natural worlds worked to naturalize expansion as an involuntary democratic impulse. …

Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture

Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture

Poe in Cyberspace: Poe MOOC Blog

Poe in Cyberspace: Poe MOOC Blog

Rebecca Harding Davis’s Human Stories of the Civil War

The decades leading up to the Civil War were fabulously rich ones for American literature—an “American Renaissance” in the words of literary scholar F. O. Matthiessen. During this era, some of the nation’s writers—notably Harriet Beecher Stowe, but also Henry David Thoreau and John Greenleaf Whittier— weighed in on the wedge that was driving North and South apart. One American writer, Rebecca Harding, known today by her married name, Rebecca Harding Davis, had an intimate acquaintance with the war, and she did not have to leave home to acquire it. When the war began in 1861, she was living in the city of Wheeling, then still a part of Virginia. Wheeling lay in a border region, and people in this part of the country had an uncommon perspective on the conflict. Harding wrote, “We occupied the place of Hawthorne’s unfortunate man who saw both sides.” As an author who lived with the Civil War at close hand, Rebecca Harding Davis not only “saw both sides” but also saw the sordidness of the war and of the men—and women—involved in it. This intimacy with the war naturally led to a great deal of knowledge about its incidents and participants, as well as some serious reflection about motivations and consequences. Davis covered the Civil War from the position of a reporter on the ground, one who saw the devastation as it occurred; but rather than cover the battles themselves, as newspapers were doing, she chose to explore the human stories behind and around the war.

"Not Altogether Human": Pantheism and the Dark Nature of the American Renaissance

"Not Altogether Human": Pantheism and the Dark Nature of the American Renaissance

"Not Altogether Human": Pantheism and the Dark Nature of the American Renaissance

"Not Altogether Human": Pantheism and the Dark Nature of the American Renaissance