Author: Joel BarlowPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : America
Languages : en
Pages : 290
Book Description
The Vision of Columbus
Author: Joel BarlowCharles Brockden Brown
Author: Alan AxelrodPublisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292758901
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 226
Book Description
Charles Brockden Brown: An American Tale is the first comprehensive literary, biographical, and cultural study of the novelist whom critic Leslie Fiedler has dubbed "the inventor of the American writer." The author of Wieland, Arthur Mervyn, Ormond, and Edgar Huntly, Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) is considered the first American professional author. He introduced Indian characters into American fiction. His keen interest in character delineation and abnormal psychology anticipates the stories of Poe, Hawthorne, and later masters of the psychological novel. Brown was eager to establish for himself an American identity as a writer, to become what Crèvecoeur called "the new man in the New World." It is especially this intimate identification of writer with country that makes Brown a telling precursor of our most characteristic authors from Poe, Hawthorne, and Cooper to Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner. To understand its significance, Brown's work must be examined as both art and artifact. Accordingly, Charles Brockden Brown: An American Tale is literary history as well as criticism, embued with insights into a writer's sources and influences and the psychology of literary composition. It is also a fascinating examination of a nation's emotional and intellectual impact on a young man in search of his identity as creative artist.
Creating an American Culture, 1775-1800
Author: Eve KornfeldPublisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 031219062X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290
Book Description
Amid the battle for American independence and the struggle to invent a federal government, American Revolutionary leaders and intellectuals sought also to create an American culture that would unify a territory of immense regional, ethnic, and religious diversity. In a sophisticated, yet accessible, interpretive narrative, Eve Kornfeld examines the efforts of Noah Webster, Benjamin Rush, George Washington, Judith Sargent Murray, David Ramsay, Mercy Otis Warren, and others to invent a national literature, narrate a story of nationhood, and educate a diverse people for virtuous republican citizenship. Among the 31 documents following the narrative are early attempts at American epic poetry, excerpts from the first narrative histories of the United States, and commentaries on the place of women and Indians in national life. Headnotes to the documents, reproductions of early paintings and portraits, a chronology, questions for consideration, a bibliography, and an index are also included.
Antipodean America
Author: Paul GilesPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199301573
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 568
Book Description
Although North America and Australasia occupy opposite ends of the earth, they have never been that far from each other conceptually. The United States and Australia both began as British colonies and mutual entanglements continue today, when contemporary cultures of globalization have brought them more closely into juxtaposition. Taking this transpacific kinship as his focus, Paul Giles presents a sweeping study that spans two continents and over three hundred years of literary history to consider the impact of Australia and New Zealand on the formation of U.S. literature. Early American writers such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Joel Barlow and Charles Brockden Brown found the idea of antipodes to be a creative resource, but also an alarming reminder of Great Britain's increasing sway in the Pacific. The southern seas served as inspiration for narratives by Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville. For African Americans such as Harriet Jacobs, Australia represented a haven from slavery during the gold rush era, while for E.D.E.N. Southworth its convict legacy offered an alternative perspective on the British class system. In the 1890s, Henry Adams and Mark Twain both came to Australasia to address questions of imperial rivalry and aesthetic topsy-turvyness. The second half of this study considers how Australia's political unification through Federation in 1901 significantly altered its relationship to the United States. New modes of transport and communication drew American visitors, including novelist Jack London. At the same time, Americans associated Australia and New Zealand with various kinds of utopian social reform, particularly in relation to gender politics, a theme Giles explores in William Dean Howells, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Miles Franklin. He also considers how American modernism in New York was inflected by the Australasian perspectives of Lola Ridge and Christina Stead, and how Australian modernism was in turn shaped by American styles of iconoclasm. After World War II, Giles examines how the poetry of Karl Shapiro, Louis Simpson, Yusef Komunyakaa, and others was influenced by their direct experience of Australia. He then shifts to post-1945 fiction, where the focus extends from Irish-American cultural politics (Raymond Chandler, Thomas Keneally) to the paradoxes of exile (Shirley Hazzard, Peter Carey) and the structural inversions of postmodernism and posthumanism (Salman Rushdie, Donna Haraway). Ranging from figures like John Ledyard to John Ashbery, from Emily Dickinson to Patricia Piccinini and J. M. Coetzee, Antipodean America is a truly epic work of transnational literary history.
Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793–1810 Vol 2
Author: Lynda PrattPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000748448
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 599
Book Description
This edition of Robert Southey's early poetry seeks to restore Southey the poet to his place at the centre of late 18th and early 19th century British literary culture. This collection of his poetical works critically reassesses Southey's epics and romances.
Creating An American Culture: 1775-1800
Author: NA NAPublisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137038349
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 286
Book Description
Amid the battle for American independence and the struggle to invent a federal government, American Revolutionary leaders and intellectuals sought also to create a culture that would unify a territory of immense regional, ethnic, and religious diversity. In a sophisticated yet accessible interpretive narrative, Eve Kornfeld examines the efforts of Noah Webster, Benjamin Rush, George Washington, Judith Sargent Murray, David Ramsay, Mercy Otis Warren, and others to invent a national literature, narrate a story of nationhood, and educate a diverse people for virtuous Republican citizenship. Among the 31 documents following the narrative are early attempts at American epic poetry, excerpts from the first narrative histories of the United States, and commentaries on the place of women and Indians in national life. Headnotes to the documents, reproductions of early paintings and portraits, a chronology, questions for consideration, a bibliography, and an index are also included.
American Antiquities
Author: Terry A. BarnhartPublisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803268424
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 594
Book Description
Writing the history of American archaeology, especially concerning eighteenth- and nineteenth-century arguments, is not always as straightforward as it might seem. Archaeology’s trajectory from an avocation to a semi-profession to a specialized profession, rather than being a linear progression, was an untidy organic process that emerged from the intellectual tradition of antiquarianism. It then closely allied itself with the natural sciences throughout the nineteenth century, especially with geology and the debate about the origins and identity of the indigenous mound-building cultures of the eastern United States. In his reexamination of the eclectic interests and equally varied settings of nascent American archaeology, Terry A. Barnhart exposes several fundamental, deeply embedded historiographical problems within the secondary literature relating to the nineteenth-century debate about “Mound Builders” and “American Indians.” Some issues are perceptual, others contextual, and still others are basic errors of fact. Adding to the problem are semantic and contextual considerations arising from the problematic use of the term “race” as a synonym for tribe, nation, and race proper—a concept and construct that does not in all instances translate into current understanding and usage. American Antiquities uses this early discourse on the mounds to reframe perennial anthropological problems relating to human origins and antiquity in North America.
The Papers of Benjamin Franklin
Author: Benjamin FranklinPublisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300134487
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 753
Book Description
In the four months following the January 20, 1783, armistice that ended the War for American Independence, Franklin was remarkably energetic as he helped oversee the transition to peace and waged a multifaceted campaign to publicize the ideals of the new nation. Though political turmoil in Britain delayed negotiations for the definitive peace treaty, Franklin deftly negotiated America's first commercial treaty with a neutral nation, Sweden, which was signed in secret. He distributed his richly symbolic Libertas Americana medal, worked toward the publication of his French edition of the American state constitutions, and fielded scores of letters from people all over Europe who sought to emigrate, to establish trade connections with the United States, to become consuls, and to offer congratulations and advice.
Poems Containing History
Author: Gary Grieve-CarlsonPublisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739167561
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232
Book Description
Ezra Pound’s definition of an epic as “a poem containing history” raises questions: how can a poem “contain” history? And if it can, does it help us to think about history in ways that conventional historiography cannot? Poems Containing History: Twentieth-Century American Poetry’s Engagement with the Past, by Gary Grieve-Carlson, argues that twentieth-century American poetry has “contained” and helped its readers to think about history in a variety of provocative and powerful ways. Tracing the discussion of the relationship between poetry and history from Aristotle’s Poetics to Norman Mailer’s The Armiesof the Night and Hayden White’s Metahistory, the book shows that even as history evolves into a professional, academic discipline in the late nineteenth century, and as its practitioners emphasize the scientific aspects of their work and minimize its literary aspects, twentieth-century American poets continue to take history as the subject of their major poems. Sometimes they endorse the views of mainstream historians, as Stephen Vincent Benét does in John Brown’s Body, but more often they challenge them, as do Robert Penn Warren in Brother to Dragons, Ezra Pound in TheCantos, or Charles Olson in TheMaximus Poems. In Conquistador, Archibald MacLeish illustrates Aristotle’s claim that poetry tells more philosophical truths about the past than history does, while in Paterson, William Carlos Williams develops a Nietzschean suspicion of history’s value. Three major American poets—T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets, Hart Crane in TheBridge, and Carolyn Forché in The Angel of History—present different challenges to professional historiography’s assumption that the past is best understood in strictly material terms. Poems Containing History devotes chapters to each of these poets and offers a clear sense of the seriousness with which American poetry has engaged the past, as well as the great variety of those engagements.
Romantic Epics and the Mission of Empire
Author: Matthew LeporatiPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009285181
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 317
Book Description
A lively account of the Romantic-era revival of epic literature set against the background of British imperialism's evangelical turn.