In The Life and Undeath of Autonomy in American
Literature, Geoff Hamilton charts the evolution of the fundamental concept of autonomy in
the American imaginary across the span of the nation's literary history. Whereas
America's ideological roots are typically examined in relation to Enlightenment Europe, this
book traces the American literary representation of autonomy back to its pastoral, political, and
ultimately religious origins in ancient Greek thought. Tracking autonomy's evolution in
America from the Declaration of Independence to contemporary works, Hamilton considers affinities
between American and Greek literary characters--Natty Bumppo and Odysseus, Emerson's
"poet" and Socrates, Cormac McCarthy's Judge Holden and Callicles--and reveals
both what American literary history has in common with that of ancient Greece and what is
distinctively its own. The author argues for the link with antiquity not only to
understand better the boundaries between self and society but also to show profound transitions in
the understanding of autonomy from a nourishing liberty of fulfillment, through an aggressive agency
destructive to both human and natural worlds, to a sterile isolation and detachment. The result is
an insightful analysis of the history of individualism, the evolution of frontier mythology and
American Romanticism, and the contemporary representation of social alienation and violent
criminality.