Making America / Making American Literature

Franklin to Cooper
Erscheinungsjahr 1995
ISBN: 978-90-5183-909-8
Verlag: Brill | Rodopi

Buch, Englisch, Band 18, 360 Seiten, Format (B × H): 16 mm x 23 mm

Reihe: DQR Studies in Literature

If 1776 heralds America's Birth of the Nation, so, too, it witnesses the rise of a matching, and overlapping, American Literature. For between the 1770s and the 1820s American writing moves on from the ancestral Puritanism of New England and Virginia - though not, as yet, into the American Renaissance so strikingly called for by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Even so, the concourse of voices which arise in this period, that is between (and including) Benjamin Franklin and James Fenimore Cooper, mark both a key transitional literary generation and yet one all too easily passed over in its own imaginative right.
This collection of fifteen specially commissioned essays seeks to establish new bearings, a revision of one of the key political and literary eras in American culture. Not only are Franklin and Cooper themselves carefully re-evaluated in the making of America's new literary republic, but figures like Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Philip Frencau, William Cullen Bryant, the "other" Alexander Hamilton, and the playwrights Royall Tyler and William Dunlop. Other essays take a more inclusive perspective, whether American epistolary fiction, a first generation of American women-authored fiction, the "public discourse" of The Federalist Papers, the rise of the American periodical, or the founding African-American generation of Phillis Wheatley. What unites all the essays is the common assumption that the making of "America" was as much a matter of creating its national literature; as the making of American literature was a matter of shaping a national identity.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Weitere Mitwirkende

Lee, A. Robert

Verhoeven, W.M.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction. Carla MULFORD: Benjamin Franklin and the Myths of Nationhood. Mason LOWANCE, Jr.: Jonathan Edwards: The Old in the New - Writing As Revelation. Nicholas ROMBES: Speculative Discourse: Uses of the Future in The Declaration, The Federalist Papers, Jefferson, and Paine. Edward E. CHIELENS: Periodicals and the Development of an American Literature. David SEED: The Mind Set Free: Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland. W.M. VERHOEVEN: Persuasive Rhetorick: Representation and Resistance in Early American Epistolary Fiction. Kathryn Zabelle DEROUNIAN-STODOLA: The Gendering of American Fiction: Susanna Rowson to Catharine Sedgwick. Richard D. RUST: Ancient and Modern in the Writings of Washington Irving. Brian HARDING: Washington Irving's Great Enterprise: Exploring American Values in the Western Writings. Gary A. RICHARDSON: Nationalizing the American Stage: The Drama of Royall Tyler and William Dunlap. As Post-Colonial Phenomena. Joseph HARRINGTON: Re-Birthing America: Philip Freneau, William Cullen Bryant and the Invention of Modern Poetics. A. Robert LEE: Selves Subscribed: Early Afro-America and the Signifying of Phillis Wheatley, Jupiter Hammon, Olaudah Equiano, and David Walker. Norman S. GRABO: Alexander Hamilton: Reality As Play. Joe LOCKARD: Talking Guns, Talking Turkey: Racial Violence in Early American Law and James Fenimore Cooper. Robert LAWSON-PEEBLES: Of Pew Canopies and Pig-Pens: The Transatlantic Travails of James Fenimore Cooper. Notes on Contributors.