Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson

Přední strana obálky
University of Chicago Press, 14. 11. 1989 - Počet stran: 358
In this ambitious study of the intense and often adversarial relationship between English and American literature in the nineteenth century, Robert Weisbuch portrays the rise of American literary nationalism as a self-conscious effort to resist and, finally, to transcend the contemporary British influence.

Describing the transatlantic "double-cross" of literary influence, Weisbuch documents both the American desire to create a literature distinctly different from English models and the English insistence that any such attempt could only fail. The American response, as he demonstrates, was to make strengths out of national disadvantages by rethinking history, time, and traditional concepts of the self, and by reinterpreting and ridiculing major British texts in mocking allusions and scornful parodies.

Weisbuch approaches a precise characterization of this "double-cross" by focusing on paired sets of English and American texts. Investigations of the causes, motives, and literary results of the struggle alternate with detailed analyses of several test cases. Weisbuch considers Melville's challenge to Dickens, Thoreau's response to Coleridge and Wordsworth, Hawthorne's adaptation of Keats and influence on Eliot, Whitman's competition with Arnold, and Poe's reshaping of Shelley. Adding a new dimension to the exploration of an emerging aesthetic consciousness, Atlantic Double-Cross provides important insights into the creation of the American literary canon.
 

Obsah

The Burden of Britain and the American Writer
3
Melvilles Bartleby and the Dead Letter of Charles Dickens
36
WRITER NATION CULTURE
55
A Litany of Causes
57
Whitmans Personalism Arnolds Culture
83
AGES OF NATIONAL LIFE
107
Cultural Time in England and America
109
Thoreaus Dawn and the Lake Schools Night
133
History Time and Spirit Whitman against Wordsworth Carlyle and Emerson against Themselves
177
REDEEMING THE REAL
205
American Actualism
207
The Actualist Hero Whitman and Wordsworth Emerson and Carlyle Once More
221
THE AGING OF AMERICA
247
Ontological Insecurity
249
Henry James and the Treaty of Gardencourt
275
Notes
297

SUBSTITUTING THE PAST
151
History in the Brain Thought in the Land
153

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O autorovi (1989)

Robert Weisbuch is professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Bibliografické údaje