Politics and Skepticism in Antebellum American Literature
By:
Sign Up Now!
Already a Member? Log In
You must be logged into Bookshare to access this title.
Learn about membership options,
or view our freely available titles.
- Synopsis
- In confronting their tumultuous time, antebellum American writers often invoked unrevealable secrets. Five of Ralph Waldo Emerson s most inventive interlocutors - Melville, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Douglass, and Jacobs - produced their most riveting political thought in response to Emerson s idea that moods fundamentally shape one s experience of the world, changing only through secret causes that no one fully grasps. In this volume, Dominic Mastroianni frames antebellum and Civil War literature within the history of modern philosophical skepticism, ranging from Descartes and Hume to Levinas and Cavell, arguing that its political significance lies only partially in its most overt engagement with political issues like slavery, revolution, reform, and war. It is when antebellum writing is most philosophical, figurative, and seemingly unworldly that its political engagement is most profound. Mastroianni offers new readings of six major American authors and explores the teeming archive of nineteenth-century print culture. "
- Copyright:
- 2014
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- ISBN-13:
- 9781316120613
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- Date of Addition:
- 10/07/14
- Copyrighted By:
- Dominic Mastroianni
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Literature and Fiction, Language Arts, Politics and Government
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.