Intellectual history is viewed in this book as a series of "great conversations"-dramatic dialogues in which a culture's spokesmen wrestle with the leading questions of their times. In nineteenth-century America the great argument centered about De Crèvecoeur's "new man," the American, an innocent Adam in a bright new world dissociating himself from the historic past. Mr. Lewis reveals this vital preoccupation as a pervasive, transforming ingredient...

The 3d v. of the author's series on the history of the literary life in America.

The discovery of the Rosetta Stone and the subsequent decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics captured the imaginations of nineteenth-century American writers and provided, a focal point for their speculations on the relationships between sign, symbol, language, and meaning. Through fresh readings of classic works by Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, John T. Irwin's American Hieroglyphics examines the symbolic mode associated...

"Honorable Mention for the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize" Kirsten Silva Gruesz is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This polished literary history argues forcefully that Latinos are not newcomers in the United States by documenting a vast network of Spanish-language cultural activity in the nineteenth century. Juxtaposing poems and essays by both powerful and peripheral writers, Kirsten Silva Gruesz...

Discusses the subjugation of Native Americans on the American frontier, and explains how it was used to justify American territorial expansion.

Loving finds in the lives and works of the two writers a symbiosis of spirit that transcends the question of literary influence. Tracing the parallel careers of Emerson and Whitman, the author shows how each served his literary apprenticeship, moved beyond his vocation, prospered, and, finally, declined in his literary achievements. In both cases, Loving follows his subject from vision to wisdom and, along the way, examines the aspects of the relationship...

Timothy B. Powell is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Georgia. He is the editor of Beyond the Binary: Reconstructing Cultural Identity in a Multicultural Context. In Ruthless Democracy, Timothy Powell reimagines the canonical origins of "American" identity by juxtaposing authors such as Hawthorne, Melville, and Thoreau with Native American, African American, and women authors. Taking his title from Melville, Powell identifies...

Nan Goodman has a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Harvard and a J.D. from Stanford. She is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Drawing on legal cases, legal debates, and fiction including works by James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Charles Chesnutt, Nan Goodman investigates changing notions of responsibility and agency in nineteenth-century America. By looking at accidents and...

"In this examination of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century American captivity narratives, author Lorrayne Carroll argues that male editors and composers impersonated the women presumed to be authors of these documents. This "gender impersonation" significantly shaped the authorial voice and complicated the use of these texts as examples of historical writing and as women's literature. Carroll contends that gender impersonation was pervasive...

This work provides a compelling explanation of something that has bedeviled a number of feminist scholars: Why did popular authors like Edna Ferber continue to write conventional fiction while living lives that were far from conventional?