Politics and Skepticism in Antebellum American Literature
$33.99 USD
Part of Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture
- Author: Dominic Mastroianni, Clemson University, South Carolina
- Date Published: October 2014
- availability: This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
- format: Adobe eBook Reader
- isbn: 9781316121702
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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.
Read more- Offers an original account of the political and philosophical thought of six major American writers
- Explores antebellum American conceptions of 'secret causes' that are neither public nor private and that go against the grain of liberal individualism
- Frames antebellum and Civil War writings within the context of modern philosophical skepticism
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×Product details
- Date Published: October 2014
- format: Adobe eBook Reader
- isbn: 9781316121702
- contains: 1 b/w illus.
- availability: This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Table of Contents
1. Moods and the secret cause of revolution in Emerson
2. Revolutionary time and democracy's cause in Melville's Pierre
3. Hawthorne and the temperatures of secrecy
4. Causes of falling, civil war, and the poetics of survival in Dickinson's 'Fascicle 24'.
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